> Duerlinger's reading of Candrakirti and Vasubandhu never questions
> whether either of them are accurately portraying their opponents

Well, no. Philosophers rarely see it as their job to engage in that sort
of textual historical work. They tend to be more interested in laying
out possible positions to a problem and studying the various arguments.
Whether anyone actually held any of the views presented is of secondary
concern. Duerlinger is an excellent philosopher. One hopes that equally
excellent historians will approach these same texts to shed more
historical light on them.

> I mean we still remain largely naive about HOW Buddhists argued.
> They are misconstruing opponents all over the place 

This may well be because they are more interested in philosophy than in
history. It may well be a little naive to expect a philosopher to
recapitulate another thinker's view accurately. There are some
philosophers who do that, but what most philosophers are more interested
in is examining the many dimensions of an issue, and often this involves
putting forth hypothetical positions and attributing them to real and
imaginary opponents. My impression is that Vasubandhu was an excellent
philosopher in that sense.

> quoting opponents verbatim, to try to minimize this foolishness)

Why dismiss philosophizing as foolishness? It is just a different
enterprise from that of encyclopedia writing and textual criticism and
philology. 

The way in which many historians may be missing the point of some of the
texts they read is that they assume that every disagreement is polemical
in nature and represents some sort of battle over territory. To be sure,
differences get magnified by philosophers, and positions are caricatured
(often for the purpose of entertainment as anything else), and a great
deal of blustery denunciation takes place in Indian philosophical
literature. But it is a grave mistake to take all that as evidence of
some kind of sectarian rivalry or verbal religious warfare.

> Rather than reject an opponent and his position simplicitur, the strategy
> is to indicate that they don't understand their own doctrines properly,
> since, if they did, they would agree with "me."

It has always seemed to me that quite a lot of that is probably
tongue in cheek.

> Now Richard is also worried that if given a choice between getting the
> Pudgalavada position right, and making up a useful version that gets them
> wrong but provides fodder with which to play with Analytics, we should go
> for the latter. 

No, I am not at all saying what one should do. I am saying that to read
a text as a piece of philosophy is one of the many legitimate ways to
read texts, and I am saying that there are instances where some Indian
philosophical literature bears some of the features of analytic
philosophy. This is no more outrageous a claim than the claim that some
Indian philosophical literature bears some features in common with
phenomenology or pragmatism or hermeneutics.

> If Buddhism stops being Buddhism 

Was Buddhism ever Buddhism? Asking whether Buddhism has has stopped
being Buddhism may be a little bit like asking someone whether he has
stopped beating his wife. Perhaps I have this all wrong, but I like to
see Buddhism as alive and dynamic and therefore always changing and
evolving. I see what many contemporaries (such as Siderits and
Duerlinger) are doing as part of the process of keeping Buddhism alive,
rather than as dissecting the corpse and examining tissues under a
microscope.

> and it won't go very far.

I do not pretend to be a prophet. I have no idea how far any approach
will go, nor do I really care. What I am more interested in is whether
an approach is interesting and fruitful while it lasts. On this I give
Siderits high marks. To suggest that a philosopher's approach to
Buddhism is bad textual historiography is as wrong-headed as suggesting
that a baseball player is playing a miserable game of cricket.

> In terms of Ramanan and the Dazhidulun, I assume you are familiar with
> Nagarjuna's writings and with the thrust of the Prajnaparamita
> literature (on which the Dazhidulun purports to be a commentary). Do you
> find Ramanan's presentation accurately representative of their contents?

I have no idea how one measures the accuracy of an interpretation of a
text. Accuracy is an entirely subjective category. When unpacked,
it invariably turns out to be a veiled way of saying "in agreement with
my own biases." Venkata Ramanan's work has a bias very different from my
bias. But when I set my biases aside and ask whether Venkata's
interpretation of Nagarjuna is plausible, I see no reason to rule it out
as one of several plausible interpretetations of a corpus of literature
that is far from univocal. Indeed, I would say that what makes the
Prajanaparamita so durable is precisely its polysemous nature.

> In which case your accusations about my ability to read is simply 
> subjective caprice. Very responsible.

There is, I would claim, a difference between knowing whether someone
else's interpretation of one's own thought is accurate and whether one's
own intepretation of someone's else's thought is accurate. I think one
can do the former with ease and cannot do the latter at all. 

> So you are supporting the idea that all thinking in Asia is mystical and 
> neoplatonic? Am I really the first person to bring that problem to your 
> attention?

No, but you are the first person I have encountered whose ability to
interpret texts is so abysmal that he reads someone saying that there
are SOME texts from INDIA that CAN legitimately be seen as having a
family resemblance to neo-Platonism and interprets that to mean that ALL
thinking in ASIA is NECESSARILY mystical. If you can't even summarize a
carefully worded proposition from a contemporary text in your native
tongue without distorting it beyond recognition, why would one have
confidence in your ablity to read difficult Chinese, Sankrit and Tibetan
texts written many centuries ago?

> "Self" is a remarkably stable, well-organised and persistent illusion

If 'self' is stable, well-organized and persistent, then why call it an
illusion? It seems to me that, to the aptly-chosen adjectives you have
used, one could also call 'self' "useful" and perhaps even "indispensable." 
So why, aside from being dogmatically loyal to a 2500-year-old taboo, 
call 'self' an illusion or a delusion? 

I know all the stock answers, so no need to repeat them for me. What I'm
interested in is something more like a good answer than a stock answer.
One stock answer is that the construct of self leads to dukkha. But is
that really the case? None of my own personal experience confirms that
claim, nor does it seem particularly reasonable. Might there be an
occasion for questioning this whole matter a little more deeply? 

I've been reading Leonard Priestley's book on Pudgalavada, and Mark
Siderits's staggeringly intelligent book Personal Identity and Buddhist
Philosophy and am close to giving up on the classical Buddhist project
of reductionism.

Reductionism is the claim that person is merely a designation, a
convenient shorthand way of talking about something much more complex,
but if one were to speak of the more complex reality, there would be no
need to speak of persons at all. For a reductionist, when one makes up a
final list of all the things that truly exist in the full sense of the
word, persons do not make the list. Dharmas survive the cut, but persons
ultimately get put into the dumpster. 

The pudgalavaadins were not reductionists at all, for they maintained
that the person DOES make the list of fully existing things and does
have predicates that cannot possibly be applied to the dharmas upon
which the person is supervenient. 

My claim is not historical but philosophical in nature. I claim that the
pudgalavaadins as described by Siderits and Duerlinger have an
interesting and viable philosophical position and that Vasubandhu
utterly failed to show otherwise. I would go further to say that if one
were interested in actually promoting a living Buddhist practice in the
West, as opposed to constructing an interesting but pointless museum of
quaint ideas from the dead past, one would do well to come up with a
non-reductionist form of Buddhism, such as the Pudgalavaada as described
by Siderits.

I think that we are now living in a time when it is seen by many people
as just wrong-headed to say that self or ego is nothing but a poetic way
of talking about more complex realities. Self is just too important a
construct in depth psychology and in moral theory to wave it aside. It
is not simply because of some beginningless delusional habit that we
think and talk of selves. Thus our tendency is to be non-reductive about
self. But we also tend not to see the self as eternal, unconditioned, and
unchanging. Indeed, most of us see self as what analytical philosophers
call supervenient. By seeing the self as a supervenient reality we can
speak seriously, and without embarrassment or shame, about such things
as self-cultivation, self-improvement, self-awareness and
self-understanding, and we can do so without buying into what most of us
would see as a metaphysical absurdity, namely, an eternal soul or
something of the like.

> Perhaps the most difficult Buddhist question of all to ask...
> What is the root of ignorance? (How did it arise?)

I don't think it is possible to begin thinking about that question until
we have determined what ignorance is. And I don't think we can begin to
tackle that question until we determine what truth is. And I don't see
any way at all of arriving at a consensus on that. So perhaps we are
asking all the wrong questions. 

Perhaps the question to ask is more like "What is troubling me right
now?" The answer is probably going to be something reasonably obvious,
such as "My knee itches." And the solution will also be pretty obvious,
such as "Scratch it." 

Most people who dig for roots don't manage to find anything but deeply
buried dogma.

> I hope this doesn't kick off that awful (in the old sense) discussion
> of the presence of absence again.

On the matter of ignorance, I don't think that Buddhists have ever 
regarded avidyaa as the absence of information. Rather, they have tended to 
see it as the presence of misinformation. It's not the absence of knowing 
reality that gets us into dukkha (and other forms of deep doodoo), but 
the presence of various delusions.

> The point is important for any neurological or information-based
> approach to Buddhism. I prefer to call this thoroughness and
> persistence, but if Richard wants to call it obsession, I'm obsessively
> persistent.

I think of perseverence as steadfastly pursuing a productive, wholesome
and worthwhile goal. Obsession (prapanca) is persistently pursuing a
line of thought that yields nothing of value. Steadfastly pursuing the
information-based approach to Buddhism seems to me a lot more like
obsession than perseverence. But that's a judgment call that probably
speaks more about my own ignorance of the subtle values of your project
than anything else. Suffice it to say I have not yet seen anything in
your project that strikes me as being productive and wholesome in the
way that other approaches to Buddhism are. But if it's getting you
closer to nirvana, go for it.

> yes, all the things are a construct of the mind. 

That also is a dogma that some people love to spout, probably because they 
think it will make them sound very Buddhist, perhaps even a little wise and 
profound. But I am confident you cannot establish its truth.

> yes, I agree. It is an inference. Although it doesn't invalidate the
> existence of an experience of something which is absent. Do you agree?

I don't know. I can't figure out what you are trying to say. What I was trying 
to say is that if one arrives at knowledge by inference, then one is not 
arriving at it by experience. So if you are saying that one's inference of 
the absence of a dog is experiential knowledge, then I would disagree 
with that.

> The experience exists. I don't say that we can experience a dog who is
> not present. Just that we can experience that a dog is not present.

That is precisely what I deny. I agree with Dignaga and Dharmakirti on this 
when they say that our knowledge that a dog is not present is not an 
experiential knowledge but an inference that involves mental 
constructions of the sort that are not present in direct experience.

> I agree. But then, if we cannot establish that the self is present or
> absent, then neither we cannot establish the impossibility of the
> overcoming of suffering.

Right. But then who would try to establish the impossibility of the overcoming 
of suffering. That would be overstepping the range of evidence. At most I 
should think one would say that there is no evidence to support the 
dogmatic claim that suffering can be ended.

> Tangling is in the eye of the entangled. The whole idea that there is
> some kind of "problem" with Buddhism that only only secularist humanists
> are able to fix is completely subjective.

Do you know of anyone who has said that? I know of plenty of people who have 
said that there should be no reason why a secular humanist cannot practice 
Buddhism, but I have never read (or heard) anyone say that only secular 
humanists can get Buddhism right. 

> From where I stand Toni Packer is just another Zen teacher who refuses
> to use the word Zen - there's hardly anything new about that. 

There is much less to Toni Packer than that. She long ago did away with Buddha 
statues, chanting, prostrations, bowing, koan practice and teacher-disciple 
hierarchy. That is doing away with much more than the label "Zen"; it is 
doing away with almost everything the label signifies, in our times at least.

> Harris called his first book "The End of Faith" - Batchelor titled his
> book "Buddhism Beyond Belief". Please point out my error - but it
> appears to me that both fellows are saying what I said they are saying -
> that there is a thing called "belief" or "faith" - and that this thing
> poses some kind of a problem. 

Your error consists in making unwarranted assumptions about books you 
obviously have not read---or have read inattentively or with the same degree 
of carelessness we have come to expect of you from your tour-de-farce 
performances on buddha-l. If you had read beyond the title page of 
Batchelor's work, you would know that his concern is not with belief as such 
but with unwarranted belief. His preference is to suspend judgment on matters 
for which there is no compelling evidence. His target (like Harris's) is 
blind faith and gullibility, not belief as such. Batchelor and Harris seem to 
agree that there are Buddhists whose faith in some things is based more on 
uncritical acceptance of personal and textual authority than on empirical 
evidence and careful reasoning.

> Then proceed to argue how one can overcome 
> this problem by getting rid of that "thing."

Batchelor shows a bit more than that one can do Buddhist practice without 
blind faith and unwarranted beliefs. He also shows that numerous Buddhists, 
and arguably the Buddha himself, saw unwarranted belief as part of the 
problem rather than part of the solution.

> But where is there anything modern or western
> or "scientific" in that claim? 

As I said, Batchelor argues that being wary of unwarranted convictions has 
been a feature of Buddhism since the Buddha himself. He makes no claim of 
being especially modern and western. Indeed, he claims to have cultivated 
these insights while practicing Korean Son as a monk in Korea. The only 
claims he makes for scientific method is that it is another rather good tool 
to use in the project of divesting oneself of unnecessary convictions. 

> Who in the history of claiming things has 
> ever claimed anything other than this? 

Aside from quite a large number of fundamentalists, fanatics and fools, few 
people have disagreed strongly with what Batchelor and Harris argue. That is 
exactly my point. So you see, we agree on the value of Batchelor and Harris. 
The only difference between us is that I have no problem acknowledging that 
thoughtful people sometimes write excellent books that are worth reading and 
thinking about, whereas you prefer to huff and puff and belittle and make 
fatuously cynical remarks. Pray for rebirth, Curt; I think your chances of 
becoming emotionally mature in this life are somewhere between slim and nil.

> It was of course Socrates who said that it really all boils down to this. 
> We only err out of ignorance - and ignorance is just the absence of knowledge.

So your point is what? That because Socrates already said that, no one else is 
allowed to make the same points in their own ways and in their own contexts?

> Don't those "picking up" the "practice" of "the four foundations of
> mindfulness" believe (for lack of a more appropriate word) that it is the
> only way for the purification of beings, for the overcoming of sorrow and
> lamentation, for the destruction of suffering and grief, for reaching the
> right path, for the attainment of Nibbana?

I cannot speak for others. I can speak only for myself. I have practiced the 
four foundations of mindfulness for years without believing any of the things 
you mention. Nothing I have ever experienced or thought about gives me 
confidence that there is ANY means for the overcoming of sorrow and 
lamentation and for the destruction of suffering and grief. That nibbana is 
possible has never been among my beliefs. I rather like the idea of nibbana, 
but not so much that I write it with a capitalized initial letter.

The only belief I have about the foundations of mindfulness is that I like 
doing them, and doing them is a lot less expensive than other things I enjoy.

> The attempt to wrest some reinvention of "meditation"
> without "the beliefs of Eastern religion" seems likely to 
> miss the point almost entirely.

Our experiences apparently differ. The contemplative exercises I have 
consistently found most useful are the four foundations of mindfulness and 
the mettaa-bhaavanaa, neither of which buy in any way into beliefs of 
any kind.

> What is "meditation", after all?

A pretty much useless word in desperate search for a meaning. I think there 
should be a twenty-year moratorium on its use---along with a fifty-year ban 
on the use of such meaningless expressions as "enlightenment."

> This is quite apart from the hubris I am inclined to assume would be needed
> to undertake the task of extracting what is useful and leaving the rest.

Aside from some forms of extreme fundamentalism, just about everyone is in 
favour of some kind of discernment. One has no choice but to try to discern 
what is useful for oneself and for others from what is not. Such discernment 
need not entail hubris. Indeed, it may well be a path to humility.

> Certainly, the Buddha Dharma clarifies these poisons and their consequences.

Yes, the Buddha-dharma is quite effective in neutralizing negativity. Indeed, 
my steadfast Buddhist practice is the principal reason why I have very little 
anger or hatred toward any individuals or toward any groups of people or any 
species of flora or fauna. But being of a generally loving and forgiving 
nature does not preclude reminding people of truths that, if forgotten, 
produce further suffering. No country on earth produces more unnecessary 
suffering right now than my home and native land, and I will continue to draw 
attention to this sad fact as long as it is true. For that is how the peace 
that you wish for me and others is most likely to come into being. 

> I think that at this point in time, American sanghas are too fragile for
> public dissent. So perhaps the question is: what qualities need to be
> cultivated by American sanghas, so that they can publically engage in dissent?

My mother used to say "If anyone waited until they were ready to have 
children, no one would have children." By extension, I think that if any 
community waited until it was strong enough to engage in dissent, there would 
be no dissent. This is especially true, given that most dissent is against 
the strong. The Quakers were dissenters from the outset. They were anything 
but strong in numbers and economic resources, but they were willing to go to 
jail and lose their jobs as a consequence of the stances they took. American 
Buddhist sanghas are much stronger in numbers and in affluence now than the 
Quaker meetings were for the first several centuries of their existence, but 
American Buddhists as groups do not seem to be manifesting the courage to put 
their collective values on the line. But perhaps I'm just not seeing it.

> There could be another sort of exclamation, similar to swearing, that is
> a cry for help.  This could be associated with concepts or a faith. When
> one is overwhelmed by a situation,  a frustrated call for help may sound
> like swearing. 

Good observation. There may be a much closer affinity between cussing and 
praying than meets the ear.

> I don't want to start monitoring the list because I think that cools
> things down too much and also because I am not a good judge of what
> is offensive since I am never offended by anything

I see you suffer from the same malady that I have. Unfortunately, this malady 
does not afflict me in the least. Some have claimed that if I were more prone 
to being afflicted by verbal barbs, I might be more diplomatic.

One of the few things I can remember about being in high school, sometime in 
the last century, is that one day some musclebound oaf splashed water on me 
in the boys' lavatory. I calmly dried myself off, which infuriated the oaf. 
He bellowed "Are you so stupid that you don't even know I just insulted you?" 
I said "I guessed that you were trying to insult me, but it didn't work. I'm 
not insulted." He splashed me again. We repeated the conversation, his voice 
becoming louder as mine grew calmer. We performed the ritual thrice.

Finally some fellow stepped up to the wash basin and said to me "If you won't 
defend your honor, I will." I said to the well-meaning interloper something 
to the effect "Don't be stupid. Nobody's honor can be damaged by a little bit 
of water. There is nothing here to defend." Later it came to my attention 
that the well-meaning interloper and the musclebound oaf got into a 
hellacious bout of fisticuffs after school, and the well-meaning interloper 
sustained several black eyes, not to mention bruises on parts of his body he 
never knew he owned. 

I have been letting others fight what they imagine to be my battles ever 
since. And when those who insist on protecting me from what they imagine to 
be threats to my freedom and security land in public office, I invariably 
vote against them. I can think of no better way to protect them, and the 
public at large, from their own folly.

> He seems to think that if you eat a bite of the 
> enchilada, then you eat the whole enchilada. If you like 
> anything that Ahmadinejad said, then you must agree that 
> it would be a good idea to wipe Israel off the map, or at 
> least (as Ahmadinejad has said in other contexts) set up 
> Israel in Germany rather than in Palestine, since it is 
> the Germans and not the Palestinians who owe the Jews an 
> apology and perhaps some kind of restoration.

I am guessing that Germany may not be ready to give a 
chunk of their turf to the Jews. So, by the powers 
invested in me by Karl Rove, I hereby offer the state of 
Utah to the Jew people of the world as their homeland. It 
has many of the features of Israel. It is dry and dusty 
and sparsely populated. It has a big lake full of water 
too salty to support life. It has a beautiful national 
park called Zion National Park. And it is already 
populated by the Mormons, who claim to be the lost tribe 
of Israel. And Utah has a lot of features that Israel does 
not have in its present location, such as the absence of 
angry Arab Christians and Muslims and the presence of 
immediate neighboring states filled with born-again 
Christians who love the Torah and believe in eyes for eyes 
and teeth for teeth. I admit I have a vested interest in 
this deal. I love a good bagel, and would be delighted to 
live in a state that sort of bordered on a Jewish Utah.

> It is very instructive to keep in mind the genesis of those books.

Oh boy! Dan is about to give us an example of the genetic fallacy. (To save 
you all a trip to the Wikipedia, the genetic fallacy consists in trying to 
dismiss an argument by discussing not its actual substance but its origins. 
It is akin to the ad hominem, which Dan also uses with admirable regularity.)

> Think about that: he was expressely forbidden
> to protest war AS A BUDDHIST.

That's not the moral I get from the story you tell. The moral I get is that he 
was forbidden to protest AS A MONK. I know of many parallels in North America 
in which Zen teachers have discouraged their students from participating in 
demonstrations while wearing the garb of monks. It's not in a monk's job 
description to farm, do physical work, run for public office, vote in secular 
elections or protest for or against governmental policies. But unless your 
claim is that nobody but a monk is a Buddhist, there is no merit to the 
conclusion you are trying to foist off on us.

> The attitude of Buddhism toward wars and militarism has historically
> been a seamless extension of Buddhism's overall approach to human
> society as a whole. 

That's right. I am fascinated by the ambivalence shown toward government of 
any kind in Buddhist literature. The attitude seems to be that government 
becomes necessary when human society has fallen into such a degenerate state 
that 1) government can barely overcome the moral degradation of the 
citizenry, and 2) government itself is done by those who are as morally 
degenerate as the citizenry. It seems very much a version of the old "who 
will guard the guardians" problem from Greek philosophy,

> Buddhism has never promoted radical, much less 
> revolutionary, changes in society (with one important exception that
> I'll get to in a moment). 

I don't think that's true. It seems to me that a number of people in Western 
Buddhism have been pretty radical. In fact, it's almost axiomatic that a 
Western Buddhist will have a leftist orientation. (I imagine more than a few 
of us cheered wildly as we listened to the speeches by Ahmadinejad and Chavez 
in the UN. We love it when people speak truth to power.) What is one to make 
of that? That Western Buddhists aren't Buddhist after all? That Western 
Buddhists are somehow unique in the history of Buddhism for their penchant 
for reinventing Buddhism to suit their own psychological needs? 

On another list, Dan Lusthaus speaks of how many Westerners are drawn to 
Buddhism because of a "carefully crafted" image of Buddhism as non-violent. 
I think that's an example of bovine feces. It's not that crafty Buddhists 
made up an image of Buddhism to draw gullible Westerners in. Rather, I 
think, it's that Westerners who were sick of wars turned to a contemplative 
tradition and thought of that tradition as they wished to think about it. 
That was certainly true of a lot of Buddhists I knew back in the 1960s and 
1970s. Many of us were pacifists and wanted our Buddhism to be pacifistic, 
so we made it that way. Nothing wrong with that. Indeed, there is a name for 
any tradition that isn't constantly reinventing itself to meet new conditions; 
extinct.

> And being "well-disposed toward Buddhism" generally means what it meant
> to good old Emperor Wu: material support for Temples and monastic
> communities. 

Let's not forget the systematic persecution of Nestorian Christians. Being the 
perverse son-of-an-atheist that I am, I love to tell my classes about the 
Buddhist persecution of Christians. Invariably, some student comes up after 
class and says "I think you made a mistake in today's lecture, sir. You said 
the Buddhists persecuted Christians. But surely it was the Christians who 
persecuted the Buddhists. Then I tell them about Amnesty International's 
reports on how Buddhists in Myanmar have been persecuting Muslims. When 
students learn that, they need to be taken to the hospital.

> How about the use of force (even deadly force) to stop or prevent more
> widespread misery (that the other guy started)?

That has been tried. If the present state of the world can be used as 
evidence, I'd suggest that the verdict is that that strategy is a 
dismal failure.

> Richard denies that ati-prasanga characterizes buddha-l (and the ati-
> prefix means "exceeds", not the bland "not warranted")

"ati" means "too much" and "prasanga" means "conclusion". When one concludes 
too much, one concludes more than the evidence supports. When one concludes 
more than the evidence supports, one has an unwarranted conclusion. 
There is nothing at all bland about that.

> Not surprising coming from someone who feels ideological affinity with
> Ahmadinejad

There is a difference between someone who agrees that Ahmadinejad has made 
some legitimate observations about the motivations of the current US 
administration, and someone who feels ideological affinity with Ahmadinejad. 

Or you you once again demonstrating your mastery of atiprasanga? 

The argument seems to go something like this:

Premise: Hayes thinks Ahmadinejad has valid criticisms against the 
         current US administration.
Conclusion: Therefore, Hayes agrees with everything Ahmadinejad says.
Premise: Ahmadinejad has fantasies of nuking Israel.
Conclusion: Therefore, Hayes has fantasies of nuking Israel.

Ja wohl, Herr Lusthaus. No doubt about it. You have shown us yet another 
instance of atiprasanga. Your conclusion exceeds your evidence.

>  I imagine that what one sees as one's
> "reality" is usually based on such stuff as experience, education,
> memories, etc. I don't know about you, but my whole life I have
> occasionally caught myself editing experience, even at the moment of
> experiencing it,

Yes, of course, but it does not follow from that that one's ideas are 
mistaken. Even if it is granted that there are distortions in any given 
interpretation, it does not follow that the distortions are serious 
enough to warrant being called mistakes.

> So, I reckon maybe
> what I mean by "mistaken" in this context is that my view of
> "reality" may or may not have much in common with the reality of
> others or with any presumed "facts" if there are such things as
> "facts". 

You hedge your bets pretty thoroughly when you say "may or may not". It 
seems to me that there is a remarkable amount of apparent agreement among 
people on a wide range of topics. Occasionally people disagree, and sometimes 
they disagree dramatically enough that they feel people need to die rather 
than be mistaken. But it seems just plain silly to me to suggest (by the use of 
quotation marks) that facts are anything less than facts. Would it not 
serve your case just as well to say that people sometimes disagree about the 
facts, instead of saying that people disagree about "facts".

> Having had some dealings with law enforcement I know, for 
> example, that eye-witness evidence is just about the worst damned
> evidence a person can find.

That probably depends quite a bit on the witness. Some people are much 
more observant than others, and some are considerably less inclined to 
prejudice than others.

> So maybe the whole thing is just one great big terrible mistake?

That conclusion seems unnecessarily melodramatic and sophomoric.

> Whom should we go to for an apology?

Socrates, of course. His apology was the most eloquent in recorded history. 
It's little wonder than the jury sentenced him to death. People who see 
as clearly as Socrates saw are dangerous to both tyrannies and 
democracies.

> This sort of nitty gritty I suppose is what is grist for the academic mill:
> it's what get the academics paid.
 
Academics will get paid regardless of what labels people pin on Buddhism. 
But some people who may NOT get paid, if the religion label is not applied,
are Buddhists who want to make money by performing weddings and funerals. 
Moreover, some tax exemptions depend in some locales on an organization's 
status as a religion. Priests and lawyers stand to make money on this 
question, but academics have nothing to gain one way or another.

Many years ago a Theravadin monk in Toronto said to the religion editor of the 
local newspaper that Buddhism is most definitely not a religion. Rather, he 
said, it is a form of psychotherapy. This caused a minor thunderstorm among 
Toronto's Buddhists, and one of the reasons given was that classifying 
Buddhism as a non-religion would put into jeopardy the right to perform 
weddings and funerals.

On the other hand, in Australia there used to be a law that only religious 
organizations could offer meditation classes, and for a short time Theravadin 
Buddhists were disqualified, because in order to be registered as a legally 
recognized religious organization, the organization had to perform weddings. 
But performing weddings contravenes the vinaya rules.

In none of the strange legal cases I have come across has the status of 
religion depended on an organization's attitude toward God.

> Thank you for this splendid example of a vicious circle and academic
> stupidity. The term 'secular religon' is a contradictio in termine, like
> 'square circle'.

That's not quite true. The first use of the term "secular" was to refer to 
priests who tended to the needs of parishioners, as opposed to cloistered 
monks. Even in contemporary terminology, a secular priest is one who performs 
various religious rituals and has pastoral duties, as opposed to someone who 
lives a cloistered life. In English, a religious is anyone who takes vows. 
Since priests take vows, a secular priest is a secular religious. No 
contradiction in terms to be found anywhere.

> There is no doubt that secularism arose as a rejection of
> religion, pure and simple.

That is not quite the case. As I mentioned earlier, the first 
occurrence of the word "secular" was in the Catholic church. It 
arose not as a rejection of anything, but as a way of supplementing 
what already existed and was expected to continue existing. Secular 
priests were those who took on pastoral duties. They are still so 
called. And there are many religious organizations around today who 
see a great deal of value of being secular, in the sense of being 
engaged in the world as opposed to withdrawing from the world.

For at least thirty years I have argued that there is much to be 
said for secular Buddhism. A lot of Buddhists apparently agree with 
me, although they often use the phrase "engaged Buddhism," by which 
they plainly mean exactly the same thing as I mean when I speak of 
secular Buddhism. 

While I agree with you that usage is of more weight than etymology 
(yogaad rudhir baaliiyas, as the classical Indian grammarians put 
it), it must be acknowledged that usage itself varies quite a lot. 
Not only does in change over time, but even at the same time one 
can find some using a term one way while others use it another. As 
anyone who has learned from Nagarjuna or any other Indian Buddhist 
thinker knows, nothing in language is permanent and fixed, and only 
the pig-headed would insist that a given word must be used in only 
one way. Some people evidently use the word "secular" in such a way 
as to make the secular the antithesis of religion; Eric reports 
that he uses the word that way. Other people see being secular as 
one of the many ways of being religious. I fall into that camp.

> One of the reasons we have to keep the precepts is out of
> compassion for the suffering others who are seeking the way, and
> so that those approaching it do not lose faith. 

As you know, following the ten precepts has always been deemed 
extremely important within the (F)WBO. Precepts should not be 
confused with monastic vows. They are not equivalent. One can break 
monastic vows without violating any ethical precepts. And one can 
keep all the monastic vows and still manage to violate some of the 
precepts, especially the speech precepts and the mental precepts. 

One could argue (as Sangharakshita has done) that monastic vows are 
based on the precepts, and I suppose that is broadly true. As Curt 
has observed, however, it is not at all obvious that all of the 
vinaya rules have something to do with morality or with the virtue 
of compassion; many seem to be aimed at what we would now call 
public relations and keeping up the sort of appearances that people 
in 5th century India needed to keep up if they wanted make a 
livelihood as religious beggars. Most scholars of the vinaya rules 
whose work I am familiar with seem to think that a good many of the 
vinaya rules were all about "image" and only secondarily about the 
cultivation of inner virtue.

>   Thank  you, but I'm not a "señorito" in any way. I'm
> just  someone  interested  in  talk about Buddhism in a
> civilized  way.  It's  just that I don't have to suffer
> Richard's (and his "friends'") speech.

Let's begin constructively. Why don't you say what exactly 
it was that you found offensive or in violation of speech 
precepts. It is possible that we disagree about some 
matters, but my disagreements with others are invariably 
cordial and in the spirit of friendship, even if they are 
sometimes ironic in tone. (The Buddha had a fondness for 
irony, too. This is the only way in which I resemble him, 
but it's a start.) In short, there is no reason why we two 
seasoned veterans of Buddhist practice cannot amicably 
discuss points on which they disagree.

> That quote comes from Russell's famous essay "Why I am Not a
> Christian", and it may be found on page 19 of the book of the
> same name.

Back in the days when I was under Russell's spell, the book you cite 
almost inspired me to write a book of my own called "Why I am not a 
Buddhist," but I got too lazy to list all the reasons. So I decided 
instead to write messages to various Buddhist venues outlining in 
some detail my views on Buddhism and let everyone else tell me why 
I'm not a Buddhist. 

Alas, most of the responses to my messages were so utterly foolish 
and poorly reasoned that they failed to convince me that I'm not a 
Buddhist, from which I can only conclude that I really am a 
Buddhist after all, if only by virtue of the failure of others to 
make the case that I am not.

> He defines those terms in this way:
>
> 1- atheist is who know that there is not a God
> 2- agnostic is who suspend any judgement until further evidence

These categories seem not to include the Buddha's position, which, as far as I 
can tell, was that the question of God's existence is not important. 

The definitions given by Russell could also leave out the position of some 
kinds of philosopher who say that because the question is poorly formulated, 
it is unclear what would count as evidence for one side or the other. I 
suppose one could call such a person an agnostic, but it seems a stronger 
position than de facto agnosticism. 

For example, one might suspend judgment on the question of whether George W. 
Bush and Richard Cheney planned the attacks on the World Trade Center. One 
might, for example, claim that not all the evidence is in and that it would 
therefore be premature to reach a verdict. So one might be a de facto 
agnostic on that question, holding the view that one lacks the evidence 
to settle a matter that is in principle decidable. But the position of 
many philosophers (including, I think, some Buddhists) is that no amount of 
evidence or reasoning can possibly settle the question of whether or not God 
(as described in a particular way) exists; the question, in their view, is in 
principle undecidable.

> Ah, Richard, methinks you underestimate the degree of the good Bhante's 
> disagreement. I believe that his point is, in fact, not unlike Vincente, 
> that without rebirth (and therefore the cessation of rebirth) the goal 
> becomes "merely" the cessation of suffering. And that "merely," I 
> believe, is a slippery slope that many Buddhists do not wish to get 
> near.

Wilfred Cantwell Smith once observed that there is no greater sign of
pettiness than using the word "mere" as an adjective to describe
another's view. It has never been entirely clear to me why anyone would
regard the cessation of suffering (dukkha-nirodha) as a trifling
achievement, saturated with "mereness", but clearly some do. May they be
happy. May they be at peace.

> Indeed, as Bhikkhu Bodhi, Thurman, and others have made clear, 
> they think it leads to the end of Buddhism. I think that they are right. 

If by Buddhism they mean attachment to a view that has very little
relevance to people living and suffering in the world today, I hope they
are right. It would be lovely to see that sort of rigidity disappear
eventually from the face of the earth. 

> I mean really-- why spend all of that time and money or retreats when a 
> shot of bourbon and a nap will suffice?

There is, I confess, not much excuse for going to retreats, unless one
is in need of getting rid of the burden of too much money. As Shunryu
Suzuki says, it is quite enough to spend about half an hour a week doing
zazen. Retreats are for those who have lost all perspective, such as
adolescents. 

As for the shot of bourbon and the nap, we all know that when the nap is
over, the problems remain. It has been the experience of many of us, I
think, that meditation is far more effective than bourbon and naps at
reducing the kinds of thinking and expectations that lead to many of the
problems of life.

> As Steve Collins felicitously put it, "It is patently false, for
> Buddhists as for everyone except the pathologically depressed, that
> everything in life is suffering." 

But then Buddhism has never taught (so far as I now) that everything in
life is suffering. As far as I know, it teaches only that there is such
a thing as suffering. One need not be depressed, or even in a crabby
mood, to acknowledge that. And Buddhism goes on to teach that suffering
arises when one has unrealistic desires that cannot be fulfilled. That
suggests that the more unrealistic desires one can jettison, the less
suffering one will experience. Everything I have ever seen of life so
far suggests that that is indeed the case. 

> As you note elsewhere, however, the promise of totally and forever
> eliminating all afflictions can lead to big headaches, that is, the
> fires of samsaric dukkha.

Hosea Ballou (the great Universalist teacher who turned his polemic wit
against Jonathan Edwards, who holed up, as I recall, in some
insignificant village called Northampton, Massachusetts) once said that
the Calvinist doctrine of predestination was the most evil doctrine ever
devised by any man. I think he got that about right. A close second, I
would suggest, is the doctrine that one can totally eliminate all
dukkha. (Alas, pretty much everyone in India fell for that one, except
for the Carvakas. They were just about the only Indians with any real
sense, which is probably why everyone else felt it necessary to stamp
them out of existence. No society can long tolerate those who make sense.)

> Is birth the cause of death, or is it simply a necessary condition 
> without which speaking of death would be meaningless

Vasubandhu and Dharmakirti both argue at considerable length that birth
is a sufficient condition for death. No other cause of death is needed
than birth itself. The argument is complex. You can read about it in the
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy sub voce "Potentials, Indian
theories of."

Zeno Vendler wrote an article on causal relations in which he noted that
all causal relations are not between things and things but rather
between events and events. Events are always complex. So when we say
something like "The bullet caused his death," we are using a shorthand
expression for something like "A bullet discharged from a gun entered
his body at a high speed and damaged a vital organ, as a result of which
he lost so much blood that he heart stopped." He points out that a good
many things have to be true, such as the fact that the victim's heart
had to keep beating to pump blood to the place where it was leaking out
of his body. So one could say, though it would sound odd, that the
victim's beating heart caused his death.

> Thank you for the reference, Richard.  I have no disagreement with birth
> being a necessary and sufficient condition preceding death

It is worth bearing in mind that the concept of necessary and sufficient
conditions is relatively modern. When we ask whether the Buddha taught
that vedan� (evaluative feeling) is a necessary or sufficient condition
for attachment or aversion, we have to say that he taught neither. The
question itself is anachronistic, like asking whether the Buddha taught
that baseball or hockey is the better sport.

> that positing birth as a cause of death results from the fallacy of
> "post hoc, ergo propter hoc." 

Not really. That fallacy consists in falsely positing a causal relation
where there is none. In the case of birth and death, they are causally
connected. Birth really is one of the many contributing factors to
death; it really is part of the hetu-s�magrī (totality of causes)
without which no death will occur. But "pst hoc ergo propter hoc" is the
fallacy of saying that a thing that precedes a second thing is the cause
thereof, as, for example, if one were to see "my computer keyboard froze
right after the dog walked into the room, so clearly the dog caused by
computer to malfunction." (Believe it or not, I have known people who
routinely committed that fallacy.)

> The cause is either intrinsic to the thing or extrinsic.

According to Dharmakīrti, the essence (svabh�va) of a thing is nothing
more nor less than the totality of causal factors necessary for that
thing's arising. So an essence is a complex, never a single thing,
because no conditioned thing has only one condition. (This principle is
behind the Buddhist rejection of the idea that the conditioned world
came out of a single cause, such as Brahman or God.)

> This may be, but in the example it clearly was not the person's birth
> that caused his death; it was the person who discharged the gun.  The
> bullet was merely an instrumental means instantiated in the "event" of the
> shooting.

The person's death was caused by everything without which it would not
have taken place, namely, the person's birth, the gun, the gun's
manufacturer, the seller of the gun, the bullet, the person's parents
and so on. One can never enumerate all the causes of any event. So saith
the Indian Buddhists with whom I am familiar. Vasubandhu even goes so
far as to say that everything that does not prevent an event is part of
that event's causal nexus. So in the example I gave of a man dying after
being shot by a bullet fired from a gun, it would be accurate to say
that Jesus's preaching the sermon on the mount was a cause (not the
cause, because of nothing can anything be said to be THE cause---even if
it is a cause) of the poor man dying of a gunshot wound.

> I claim that, to be a Buddhist, a person must accept the Four Noble  
> Truths as worthy of basing ones activities upon, and that one must be  
> making a sincere effort to follow the path toward the cessation of  
> misery. 

Sadhu, sadhu, sadhu. Well said, Brother James. Just about everyone in
the Buddhist tradition would agree with this fine statement you have
made. 

Of course, the Four Noble Truths were not at all unique to Buddhism.
They were also part of the traditions of just about every school of
philosophy in India, and they were not at all unlike principles accepted
by several guilds of Greek philosophers. So what makes someone a
Buddhist, as opposed to someone else earnestly striving in the general
direction of reducing (and, if one lucks out, even eliminating) nuisance
(dukkha), is doing that striving in the context of going for refuge to
the three jewels. 

Going for refuge to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha is usually
described in such a way that even a person who had never heard of Gotama
Buddha would qualify.

For example, that notorious freethinking heretic Vasubandhu tells us
that going for refuge to the Buddha means nothing more nor less than
striving to cultivate the virtues that every Buddha has, which include
such things as intellectual and emotional flexibility. So part of being
a Buddhist is struggling to overcome the tendency to be rigid and
dogmatic and unforgiving. 

Going for refuge to the Dharma means striving for Nirvana, the
elimination of dukkha. 

Finally, going for refuge to the Sangha means being willing to learn
from those who have eliminated belief in a permanent self, eliminated an
attachment to vows and good conduct (which is further explained as
following vows and cultivating good conduct in order to gain merit for
oneself), and eliminated the tendency to dismiss new ideas without first
thinking about them; and to learn from those who have reduced (not
necessarily eliminated) anger and lust; and of course to learn from
those who have eliminated anger and lust and those who have gone a step
further and uprooted all pride, and all tendencies to compare oneself to
others, all attachments, even to the subtle pleasures of meditation. 

In short, if you are aiming in the general direction of nirvana, and are
cultivating wisdom and compassion and rooting out dogmatism, and if you
admire people who have accomplished something through their practice
(which means getting over the tendency to belittle them or be envious of
them), you qualify as a Buddhist.

> Thus, we all have undergone innumerable rebirths _in this very life_.
> That interpretation works just fine for me.

And the beautiful part of it is that that interpretation is, and has
been, part of Buddhist tradition for a very long time. The beauty of
Buddhism (and any other living tradition) is that very little is
discarded. There is a great tolerance of laying new layers of meaning
and understanding upon old texts, without taking the older meanings
away. In this way, the potential audience keeps growing, in principle at
least. It makes me happy to see that this has been going on in the West
for the past hundred years or so. Rather than presenting Dharma in a way
that people think they have to choose between Dharma and science, or
Dharma and historiography, or Dharma and Marxism, most Buddhists have
presented Dharma so that people can devote themselves completely to
practising it without abandoning the other ways of looking at the world
that they find viable. Why anyone would object to this is a mystery to
me, but not one that I lose much sleep over.

> It is in the very 'thinking about' and 'meditating on' that Buddha's
> teachings are proved to be beneficial. 

On the other hand, it makes sense to be a little selective about what
one choose to meditate on. For example, as Bob Zeuschner has pointed
out, the Buddha had some teachings on geography that don't repay the
effort one might spend on reflecting on them. Some of his notions of
physiology strike me as pretty quaint, and so I have never found it
useful to spend much time reflecting on them. In some texts (such as the
Lankavatara) it is said by a character called the Buddha that all
buddhas teach in Sanskrit, because Sanskrit contains all the sounds of
all human languages. That I know to be false, so I don't spend a lot of
time meditating on it.

I have given some thought to rebirth, just because I like thinking about
questions in philosophy of mind. But I have never found any use for
meditating on rebirth as part of my practice. None of the people who
taught me meditation exercises ever said anything about it, so it has
never been part of my practice to give it any thought. Unfortunately, I
have derived so much personal benefit from the practices I was initially
taught that I have never felt a need to seek for other practices. It
seems to be an instance of the old dictum "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

> It is for this reason that I accept the teachings on rebirth.

Of course. It would be foolish not to accept that they are part of the
tradition. I'm not aware of anyone who would deny that.

>  I do not believe them, but I believe in them.

This distinction does not work very well for me. My own preference would
be to say that I believe these teachings have long been part of
Buddhism, but I have never yet found a use for them, nor do I have any
way of determining whether or not they are true. They don't cause me the
least bit of discomfort, so long as no one insists too strongly that
people who do not believe that they are true are somehow incapable of
cultivating the virtues that define what it is to be a buddha.

> If one believes in rebirth, he has plenty of lifes to achieve dukkha-nirodha.

Not necessarily. One may BELIEVE that one has plenty of lives. But that
belief could be false. One can't be certain about such things.

I'm sure you know the story of the Zen master who was asked by a lay
person whether there really is such a thing as rebirth. "Of course there
is," replied the Master. A monk happened to be outside the door of the
Master's room, and he overheard the conversation. Next time he saw the
Master, the monk asked whether there really is such a thing as rebirth.
"Of course there is not," roared the Master. "Aha! I have caught you
contradicting yourself," said the monk. "You told the layman that there
is rebirth, and you tell me there is not." The Master said "If I tell a
layman there is no rebirth, he will not behave himself well, and he will
get into all kinds of mischief. If I tell a monk there is rebirth, he
will become lazy and postpone his effort to achieve enlightenment in
this very life." 

> When I first went to see Khenpo Khartar Rinpoche, the first thing he 
> said to me is "Whether you believe it or not, there is rebirth.
> Otherwise you could do anything you want with no consequences."

What an odd argument, eh? I have never believed in rebirth or in any
kind of personal afterlife, and yet it has never occurred to me that any
action of mine would have no consequences. It has always seemed obvious
to me that every actions has consequences. It's just that sometimes the
consequences are suffered by people in the future and in other countries.

> Reducing  dukkha  has  never  been  the  goal of the
> Buddhist path, but stopping it (3rd Noble Truth). 

Where I come from, full cessation is a limiting case of reduction. So I
think we can say that the goal of Buddhism is reducing dukkha, as Dr.
Peavler said. Whether it is possible to reduce dukkha to zero is a
matter of faith. Even if one does not believe it is possible, one can at
least believe it is possible to reduce it quite a bit. Nothing is harmed
if one sets that as one's goal. Then, if it turns out that it's possible
to reduce it to zero, one will not be disappointed, I'm guessing.

I think it's always a good idea to recall what Socrates said about
death. None of us, he says, can know what happens after death. Those who
claim to know are only revealing their own lack of wisdom, for they do
not know that they do not know. The person who admits that she does not
know what happens after death is wiser than one who claims to know the
unknowable. So if one wanted to be a Socratic Buddhist, as Stephen
Batchelor is, one could pursue Buddhist practices every bit as
wholeheartedly as someone who blindly accepts the doctrine of rebirth.

> Then, the  First Noble Truth says: "Birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha,
> death  is  dukkha"  (SN LVI.11). 

Much more important than that is the more all-embracing definition:
"Getting what one does not want is dukkha, and not getting what one
wants is dukkha."

Now let's look at two possibilities. Either it is possible to eliminate
dukkha completely (by eliminating all desires) or it is possible only to
reduce it (by reducing the number of desires one has). If one wishes to
eliminate ALL dukkha, then one will be disappointed if one cannot do it,
and hence will experience the dukkha of failure. But if believes on that
it is possible to reduce desires, then one will not be disappointed by
having reduced some, will probably go on to reduce a few more and may
even eliminate quite a few, but will never be subject to the dukkha 
that goes with failure to eliminate them all. 

So the best strategy is obviously to drop all thought of perfectionism,
to start where one is and to begin working at eliminating desires,
beginning perhaps with the easy ones (such as the desire to create a
perfect Utopia that is completely free of Republicans) and then working
up to the harder ones (such as the desire for a second helping of ice cream).

> If  one  doesn't  believe  in  Buddhism and tries to
> achieve  a  different  goal  using some of the Buddhist
> techniques, I think that it's fine.

A so you must also think it's fine to strive to achieve the Buddhist
goal of reducing dukkha by reducing desires and unrealistic
expectations. If one looks at the vast majority of Buddhists in the
world, that is all they are trying to do in this life. And those who are
wise (in a Socratic sense) are content to have made good progress along
this path in this life. Whether there is another life matters not in 
the least.

> It  seems  that  you  can't believe without rational proofs. 

Oh, I doubt that very many people would make that claim. Rather, I think
there are quite a few people here who would say (as I do) that their
current beliefs are working quite well for them and that they see no
need to abandon workable beliefs without good reason. For those who are
operating quite well in a belief system that does not include any
opinions about what happens after death, we see no need to add a belief
about what happens after death. And if we were to add such a belief, we
would rather have some evidence.

> Do you happen to know how many believing in rebirth also believe in
> alien abductions, immaculate conception, astrology, poltergeists,
> mantras that heal 
> baldness, flatulency, give one a nice and shiny complexion, make one 
> smell of santal wood etc. etc.

Emerson makes the observation that for those who cannot escape the
prison of the self, astronomy becomes astrology, mathematics becomes
numerology, physiology becomes phrenology and palmistry, and physics
becomes technology. Bhikkhu Buddhadasa would add that for those who
cannot escape the prison of the self, dependent origination becomes
rebirth.

(N.B. I am paraphrasing Emerson. The actual quotation can be found by
searching the complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson at
http://www.emersoncentral.com )

> Anyway,  rebirth is an integral part of Buddhism

Tell me, which of the four noble truths discusses rebirth?

> what  you  are really talking about is about using some
> Buddhist techniques out of context.

All I have said is that the four foundations of mindfulness and metta-
bhavana seem to be rather effective in reducing dukkha. Correct me if
I'm wrong, but is reducing dukkha not the principal issue in Buddhism?

> Take away rebirth and, instead of a powerful religion, you will have a
> quite simplistic psychotherapy.

Well, if one subtracts the dogma of rebirth from Buddhism, one still has
a rather powerful and effective repertoire of psychotherapeutic tools,
but I would not be so quick to dismiss such contemplative exercises as
the four foundations of mindfulness and metta-bhavava as simplistic.
Being the sort of pluralist that I am, I am quite happy with the idea
that different people have different goals in life. For many people, the
four foundations of mindfulness and metta-bhavana are quite enough, and
one can benefit from both of them tremendously without any reference to
rebirth. And if one learns these techniques from Buddhists and wishes to
avoid plagiarism by acknowledging that these are Buddhist practices, I
see no harm in such people saying that they are drawing upon Buddhist
sources.

As I have said before, I practiced a Korean style of Zen for many years
and never once heard the master speak about rebirth. He did not deny it.
(I know of few people who deny it outright.) He simply never spoke about
it. Should I write to him and demand that he stop calling his temples
Buddhist temples?

>  Could one be clearheaded enough to follow Nagarjuna's arguments, and
> then put on an SS uniform to go party? It kinda boggles the mind,
> n'est pas?

I am having a hard time being boggled by this. In fact, I see a certain
phenomenological consistency in the kind of thinking Nagarjuna does and
the kind of thinking a Fundamentalist, or a Nazi, does. What they both
have in common is a sort of obsessive reliance on oversimplification,
literalism and the application of one kind of argument to solve all
problems. They are both hyper-rational and devoid of subtlety. If one
talks to a Fundamentalist (or a Nazi or a bigot or a Madhyamaika) one
often encounters a steel wall of impeccable logic. Every avenue of
potential criticism has been shut out by a recursive application of a
simplistic method of thinking. In fact, I almost find it surprising that
we don't find more fanatics among the ranks of Nagarjuna scholars.

> But I will not buy either his cheap imitation of the Buddha when I can
> have a high-quality and original one that has been tested for more than
> 2000 years. 

That you value a myth that suits your fancy is hardly a justification
for dismissing as a cheap imitation a myth that suits another person's
fancy. If you are willing to live in a world of myth, you cannot deny
another the same privilege, even if the other person's myth of choice is
incompatible with yours.

>    I  don't  think  that  the  Buddha was worried about
> being  socially  active.  He  spent most of his time in
> deep  jhana  and  also spent some time teaching. And it
> seems that he was wise enough to do it.

I don't think we have any reliable evidence about how the Buddha spent
his time. One thing we can be sure of is that he seems to have accepted
a lot of invitations to dinner. But what he was doing when not eating,
not talking to monks, not talking to laity and not talking to elephants,
we'll never know. Nor should we. Even buddhas are entitled to a bit of
privacy.

> Of  course,  Westerners  don't  tend  to  like to be
> remembered  of  this  and  are  trying  to rewrite what
> Buddhism is.

Be fair, Benito. EVERYONE has tried to rewrite what Buddhism is,
beginning with those who compiled the various canons. The Buddha is a
construction, a fabrication in the imaginations of editors and authors.
Everyone who goes for refuge to the Buddha goes to for refuge to a
different Buddha of her own imagining. We are all entitled to construct
the Buddha in whatever way we fancy. There is no reliable means of
saying that Jose's Buddha is any more or less accurate than Guillermo's.

> Also, one of the reasons for some of this is that, in America, so much
> of Buddhist scholarship has been by anthropologists, who do, as you
> know (Yes, I am an anthropologist also -- mea culpa!) tend to go for
> the exotic and folk practice, on 
> the grounds that that is what is 'real', i.e., 'of The People'

A lot of Buddhist scholarship is descriptive, while other scholarship is
prescriptive. As a philosopher, I could not care less what Buddhist
people actually do. My attention is focused almost entirely on what,
according to reflective people, a Buddhist ought to do. The guide to
this is texts and their commentaries, not observation of the behaviour
of that the Buddha repeatedly called the foolish masses. But that is
just my taste.

> Could it be that American buddhology was built on those early
> acquaintancies with Buddhism, freshly imported by colonizing
> orientalists, while the British built a legacy on the remains of their
> colonial past?

I think there may be something to that. The American fascination with
Buddhism in the 19th century has been ably chronicled by Thomas Tweed,
who detected four major strains of enthusiasts: anti-religious
rationalists (which would include quite a few Unitarians and
Universalists and scientists), supernaturalists and spiritualists of
various kinds, Theosophists and post-Emersonian Transcendentalists.

In the 1950s, when Buddhism became a household word in the USA, most
attention seems to have been on Zen. In the 1960s and 70s Tibetan
Buddhism caught the fancy of people who had taken way too much LSD, and
as people discovered that Zen actually required some self-discipline, it
quickly fell out of favor. One of the aftermaths of the Vietnam war was
an interest in the potentials of Buddhism for social activism and what
most people now call "engaged Buddhism." To follow the trajectory of
Buddhist studies in the USA, you have to follow the drugs: alcohol
(Zen), psychedelics (Tibetan Mahayana), cocaine (Vajrayana). American
academics don't do sobriety, which could be why they also don't do
Theravada.

Not long ago I was helping one of my students make decisions about where
to apply for graduate school, and I happened to take a look at the
website for Boston University. I was amazed to see that they now offer a
wide range of courses on American Buddhism, American Hinduism, and
American Islam. They have relatively few courses on Asian religions in
Asia. I suspect this trend will catch on in the United States. (Even I
have given in to it; well more than half of my course on Zen Buddhism
this semester will be on American Zen.) 

I think this trend of Americans specializing in American Buddhism will
catch on for two reasons: 1) Americans, as a rule, have almost no real
interest in any culture except their own, and 2) most Americans have
such poor training in languages (including English) that they lack the
intellectual equipment to study Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, Tibetan,
Tokharian, Mongolian, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese texts. So if they
want to study Buddhism they read Alan Ginsberg, Ken Wilber and Elizabeth
Claire Prophet. (At my university, undergraduates are required to take
only ONE SEMESTER of a foreign language. And for most of them, this will
be their first exposure to a foreign language. Can you believe it? What
do you think the odds are for getting an American student who has never
studied any foreign language before the age of 18 up to speed in
classical Sanskrit or Pali or Tibetan?)

> Tolle advises us to look within ourselves to understand how we create
> our own suffering and how we can relieve ourselves of our self created
> suffering. He discovered this by looking within himself at a time when
> he was suffering and unhappy. He saw how his mind generated his pain.
> Through his own efforts, he discovered the causes of his suffering and a
> path for the relief of suffering.

As you point out very well (for which, thank you!) this
"methodology" (if I may use a word I have learned to hate) has a pretty
decent pedigree. Not only is it what the Buddha did, as you point out,
but it's not so different from what Jung did and from what Emerson did
and from what most people who are worth listening to have done. 

What is interesting is that most people who look in themselves come up
with a pretty strong sense that the traditional categories of analysis
(non-dualism being one of them) have become somewhat threadbare, and
that people who rigidly follow them ring hollow, like spit falling into
an empty bucket.

> Because the Advaita Vedantists discovered this does not make Tolle a
> neo-adviata. Because Buddha discovered this does not make Tolle a
> revisionist Buddhist-lite. 

Every now and then I like to imagine how the world would look if time
ran backwards. Then we could hear Devadatta fulminating against Gotama
and accusing him of being nothing but Tolle Lite.

> No one can live in a non-dual state of mind.

True enough, but come to think of it, are states of mind the sort of
thing that can be lived in? The only states of mind I have ever
encountered are so short that by the time I've packed up my household
goods to move into them, they have left. As one of my professors, Tony
Warder, used to point out, minds do not have states. Only static things
have states, and the mind is the least static thing there is. (Of
course, he had never tuned in to my mind, which is full of static most
of the time, but I digress.)

> Tolle makes a great contribution if only by showing that the normal
> human mind is neurotic. Alan Watts said the same thing. He said the
> normal human mind is the breeding ground of neurosis. Ronnie Laing
> said it too, and was considered crazy for calling normal people crazy.

Jack Kornfield raised many a Buddhist eyebrow when he said (agreeing
with Jung) that no one ever gets rid of all their neuroses; at best, one
learns to manage most of them them most of the time. I heard Buddhists
saying that at the moment Kornfield said that, he stopped being a
Buddhist, as if that were some kind of tragedy.

> These newer, new age Advaitins are selling the most ephemeral package  
> of all and if you don't "get it" you gotta come back for another  
> seminar or buy another tape.

Henry Miller once observed that heroin addiction is the perfect metaphor
for capitalism. People are enticed to buy what they don't need or want,
and then it ruins their health. There is not much in the world of
unrestricted free trade that does not meet that description. And that
includes religion and self-help psychology and formal education.

> What is bizarre to me is the rapidity with which these people claim
> their own enlightenment. 

You really do have a prapanca about that, don't you? Why does it stick
in your craw so much that people, such as Siddhartha Gotama, claim to be
enlightenened? If they are mistaken, they are simply mistaken, and no
one is the worse for it.

It could be that what sticks in your craw (as it sticks in mine) is the
very fact that there is no means of knowing whether or not someone is
mistaken when they claim to be enlightened. It is a perfectly vacuous
claim, unfalsifiable and unverifiable.

> Of course then you can tell others about it. Start your own satsang.
> Share your new- found non-dual awareness. And they do.

Yes. And what is the harm in that? A few suckers lose a few shekels. Is
it any worse than all the people telling others how to lose weight, make
money, have whiter teeth, make better impressions on potential
employers, and face terminal cancer with comfort and joy? 

> In many, many ways the path that has the most potential for abuse is
> the non-dual path because a charismatic person, with a sharp, keen
> mind and mouth can talk the talk quite convincingly. But can they walk
> the walk? Or have they? 

What difference does it make whether a teacher can walk the walk? The
only thing that matters is whether she can help someone else walk the
walk. As the Buddha said, some farmers till their own fields and help
their neighbors till their fields, and some farmers till their
neighbors' fields but neglect their own. Even if one only helps his
neighbors but neglects his own, he is no less good as a farmer.

As for Tolle, he claims he is at peace. And all he claims is that he can
help others discover their own peace. That seems pretty much like
walking the walk to me. Of course, he could be lying about being at
peace. But until we find out that he secretly tortures cats just for the
joy of watching them suffer, which I would take to be a sign that he is
not as peaceful as he says, I'm prepared to give him the benefit of the
doubt when he claims to be at peace. Why assume a man is lying?

> If we are going to relieve peoples suffering we must possess the tools
> to genuinely do that. I do not see that in this movement.

No, of course you do not. You have your own standards, which are
obviously far superior to the standards of anyone else (for which you
should be very proud of your self), but it may be worth bearing in mind
that you are looking for something very specific and will naturally not
find it in anything that is not exactly what you are looking for.

> I do feel this is a topic worthy of close investigation, discussion
> and debate among both practitioners and scholars.

What do scholars know that would be of any use to a discussion like
this? I am a scholar of Buddhism, and when I look at Tolle as a scholar
of Buddhism, then I'll say something like "Tsk! This Tolle fellow is not
explaining Nagarjuna very well at all! He's not a true Madhyamika. And
he clearly doesn't know the right way to eradicate each of the major and
minor kleshas as taught by Vasubandhu, so he's a piss-poor abhidharmika.
And he hasn't mentioned Amitabha even once, so how can I take him
seriously as a Pure Land Buddhist?" 

Or we could get some hotshot scholar in the Bhamati school of Advaita
Vedanta to appraise his words and assure us that he is not even
explaining Srngeri Advaita very well, let alone the much more lofty
Bhamati version. And then we could dismiss him as someone unworthy to
direct a doctoral thesis is Buddhist philosophy or in Advaita Vedanta (a
task that Tolle has no aspiration to do in any case). 

And similarly, if we ask practitioners to conduct a close investigation,
they will point out that Tolle does not hold his thumbs correctly when
he puts his hands together in anjali or that he does not recite the same
texts or gaze adoringly at the same wooden statues as they do, so they
will surely find his practice wanting in finesse and dismiss him as a
fraud. As a practitioner of Buddhism, I can vouch for the sad fact that
Eckhart Tolle is neither an acariya nor a lama nor a zenji. So I guess
we can thrown his book in the sewer, eh?

Wait, I have another idea. How about keeping scholars and practitioners
out of this discussion? It seems as though their eyes have been swollen
shut by their own egos. Perhaps the people we should ask are people who
have been in pain and have encountered Tolle's work in some form or
other. And we should ask them whether their suffering has been reduced,
even for a while.

>  What qualifies him to even teach?

Nothing qualifies anyone to teach aside from having the ability to
attract students. If people listen to you, you're a teacher. Period. If
people don't find what you say useful, they'll stop listening. If no one
listens to you, you're no longer a teacher. Pretty simple, eh?

> How did someone this dull become the flavor of the month anyway? 

We are living in times when people are waking up to the fact that they
are fat and sick from eating way too much sugar and fat and salt. As
people rediscover plain nutritious fruits and grains to put on their
tables, they may also discover plain and simple teachings to put in
their minds. If Eckhart Tolle were trying to be another Woody Allen or
George Carlin or Robin Williams, then I'd say he may have missed his
calling. But as far as I can see, he isn't trying to be anyone but
Eckhart Tolle. And these days some people resonate to people who aren't
trying to appear to be a lot bigger than they are.

> I guess Tolle's teaching is fine as far as it goes. Apparently there are 
> many people who simply can't handle anything more.

And there may be people who have learned that they neither want nor need
anything more.

Anyway, thanks for giving us all a good look at what Tolle would call
your pain body - that part of your ego that grows fat and groggy by
pointing out all the inadequacies of others. They also serve by
illustrating some of Tolle's insights into how the self creates misery
to ourselves and to others.

> Feigning ignorance is a common form of disingenuousness - but does not 
> define it. Any argument that is "lacking in candor" - like intentionally 
> misrepresenting your opponent's positions - is disingenuous.

So that raises the interesting question of why you characterize your
dialogue partners as disingenuous, which suggests that they are
deliberately and calculatingly misrepresenting you. Would it not be more
charitable to characterize your dialogue partners as misunderstanding
you or simply being mistaken in their interpretation of your words? 

> The Gospels are immediately placed under a hermeneutic of suspicion
> because they are accepted by a faith community

The "hermeneutics of suspicion" of Paul Ricoeur was meant to liberate
communities from the self-deception involved in editing and interpreting
texts in a way that serves the powerful at the expense of the weak. It
is not so much that the gospels themselves are immediately placed under
a hermeneutics of suspicion, but that one should be suspicious of
interpretations of the gospels that serve the interests of power
structures (such as, oh, the Catholic Church and various Eastern
Orthodox churches). Used properly, the hermeneutics of suspicion can,
among other things, help recover the teachings of a Jesus who emphasized
service to the poor, the weak and the disenfranchised.

It goes without saying that a hermeneutics of suspicion could (and
should) also be applied to interpretations of Buddhist texts that favor
the interests of imperialistic states, big business, corporate
capitalism, economic globalization, the military and so forth.

I wonder if Dr Steinmetz is familiar with the Buddhist concept of
prapanca. There are various translations of the term, one being
"obsession." It refers to the enterprise, which all of us indulge in to
some extent until we become arhants, of preserving one's pet theories at
all costs. The Buddha recommended that we try to drop our prapancas. In
one of my favorite passages on the topic, the Buddha said:

\begin{quote}
Others will misapprehend according to their individual views, hold on to
them tenaciously and not easily discard them; we [followers of the
dharma] shall not misapprehend according to individual views nor hold on
to them tenaciously, but shall discard them with ease---thus effacement
can be done. (Sallekha Sutta)
\end{quote}

The "effacement" being talked about here is the prevailing metaphor of
the Sallekha Sutta. "Sallekha" means scratching something out that has
been written. It is the act of erasure. (People who grew up using
computers probably have no idea what erasing is. It's what people used
to do before they had delete keys.) The idea is that we achieve peace
and tranquility by erasing the self that is delineated by various
habitual patterns of behavior and thinking. We erase our prapancas by
recognizing them as such and then seeing what damage they are doing. 

Of course, when one is throughly caught up in a prapanca, one cannot see
either the prapanca nor the damage it is doing. One simply thinks one is
defending the Truth. So sometimes it takes a kind-hearted friend to
point our prapancas out to us.

> By these standards one could doubt the existence of Socrates, Hui
> Neng, and other luminaries.

Yes, one could doubt their existence. One could also reasonably doubt
the existence of the Buddha. And no harm would come of it at all,
because the emphasis on the study of the Buddha is the message
attributed to him, not the messenger himself. It is the message that
stands or falls on its own merits; the source makes no difference
whatsoever. As Nagasena pointed out to Milinda, who asked for proof that
the Buddha existed, the four noble truths and the precepts and rules of
the monastic order all undeniably exist. They are not eternal, so
somebody must have created them. Whoever it was who articulated the
Dharma (whether one person or a committee of editors) can conventionally
be called by a name, say, the Buddha Gotama. 

Exactly the same could be said of Socrates. Did he really exist, or was
he a fictitious character invented by Plato? Doesn't matter; what
matters is the method of dialogical inquiry exemplified in the dialogues
in which Socrates was a character. The same sort of thing could be said
of Huineng.

The same COULD be said of Jesus, were it not for the fact that so many
generations of Christians have neglected the man's message and placed
emphasis instead on the historicity of his death. If the Qur'an, or any
number of gnostic teachings, were correct in saying that Jesus did not
die on the cross but that someone who resembled him died and was
mistakenly identified as Jesus, then all Nicene-based Christianity is in
deep trouble. Christianity without a dead and resurrected Christ is just
another one of the many philosophical guilds based on the reported words
of a real or fictitious man who said quite a few pretty good things. 

To insist on the historicity of the Christ myth as invented by the
demented Paul is to invite perfectly reasonable criticisms and inquiry.
And when that inquiry takes place, as it has done repeatedly throughout
history, the results of impartial inquiry may not please the leaders of
powerful institutions based on the shaky foundations of pseudo-
historical narratives.

> Protestants are actually a worst case scenario when it comes to defining 
> Religion solely in terms of belief.

That is why I suggested that belief, rather than creeds, is the
important issue. Most of the influential American Protestant sects
abandoned formal creeds in favor of a general view that acceptance of
Christ as one's savior, and the resultant moral action that allegedly
comes about only when that conversion has occurred, is far more
important than the propositions that one affirms. 

This emphasis on post-conversion moral purity is why, in the United
States at least, so much emphasis has been placed on "social gospel,"
which often takes the form of legislating righteous conduct. It is to
this emphasis that we owe such arguably positive developments as the
abolition of slavery and the suffrage of women, and such arguably
negative developments as the prohibition of alcohol, laws against
abortion and same-sex marriage, and the abundances of laws against doing
anything but praying on Sundays. (Many of those laws are no longer in
effect, but just recently the Rose Bowl parade had to be held on January
2 rather than the traditional January 1, because of an old Christian-
inpsired law against holding parades on Sundays. One has to be impressed
by any force strong enough to interfere with the sacred game of football
in this country!)

> The business model for Protestantism seems to be for every two-bit
> self-proclaimed preacher to set up his or her own church based upon
> yet another hodge-podge of ideological idiosyncrasies.

What has driven American revivalism since before the American revolution
is a deeply anti-intellectual emotionalism. This was true during the
revivalist period that made Jonathan Edwards famous, and it was equally
true of the revivals in the 19th century, both before and after the
civil war. It was true of the revivals of the early 20th century, and it
is true of the "born-again" Christian fervor that darkens the minds of
the likes of George W. Bush, Bill Frist and Tom DeLay. Belief is part of
that dismal picture, to be sure, but it is a belief based more on fear-
mongering and other forms of contagious hysteria than on phronesis. What
Harris has been advocating, as I read him, is something not far from a
return to the Greek love of phronesis (moral decision making based on
wisdom derived from careful and impartial observations of the natural
world). Buddhists called the same thing mindfulness.

> Maoists, communists, imperialists, "freedom fighters" and "liberators"
> have no problem justifying violence without even reference to an ancient
> religion.

How true. In Harris's book, the emphasis is not on religion as such but
on all kinds of systems of belief that depend on faith rather than
evidence. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are examples of such systems,
but one can find plenty of examples outside the area of religion.

I still like William James on this whole matter. His essay "The will to
believe" is a masterpiece. James was fond of pointing out that the vast
majority of what any human being knows is based on some kind of faith,
or at least some kind of confidence that some person or text is an
authority. He likes to observe that the majority of people in modern
society believe that the earth goes around the sun, but very few people
would have the faintest idea how to argue that conclusion from their own
observations. The same can be said of most scientific hypotheses. Most
modern people believe in Darwin's theory of descent with modification,
but few could make a good case for it. Most non-scientists could not say
why they believe that the earth is billions of years old. They believe
it because that's what they were taught in school.

Even more interesting to me are things that are commonly believed but
are in fact false. For example, many people, when asked to tell you what
Darwin taught would tell you that he taught the theory of evolution.
Well, yes, but he did not call it that. He called it descent with
modification. And many people would tell you that Darwin taught the
principle of survival of the fittest. Well, no, he never taught any such
thing. That theory was taught by an ultra-right-wing rival of Darwin
named Herbert Spencer. Spencer's social philosophy was based on pseudo-
scientific principles that were ultimately discredited for lack of
evidence. Ironically, the terminology of his unscientific dogma was
grafted onto Darwin's theory. 

As Paul Bloom wryly observes, the human race seems to have evolved so as
to misunderstand Darwin. Or, as the Buddha observed, we were all born
with a penchant for delusion, and most of us will die with it.

> I call this the theosophic fallacy: rising in your judgement above all
> religions, saying that you're impartial and have taken the essence out
> of all and turning this into a new religion.

That is indeed a fallacy, but the Zoroastrians, Muslims, Vedantins,
Sikhs and authors of the Lotus Sutra were using it far before the
Theosophists. Indeed, some of the Campellites (whom I mentioned earlier)
were doing pretty much the same thing in the USA in the early 19th
century. They set out to unify Christianity by discarding all divisive
creeds and practices and ended up forming a denomination that everyone
else rejected. They then became extraordinarily isolationistic, lest
their unifying purity be contaminated by divisive sectarianism. This
sect thrived in the American South. I think they may have been the
inspiration behind George W. Bush saying of himself "I'm a uniter, not 
a divider."

> There is a tendency to religion in most cultures, but this may be due
> to the definition of religion. Dürkheim came close in my view to see
> religion as a kind of hidden tribalism. If we want to live and if we
> want our grandchildren to live, we should overcome that.

The chances of overcoming it are close to nil, I think. The disease
infects 90% of human beings. It is so pervasive that even systems of
thought that strive to eliminate religion end up becoming
indistinguishable from religions themselves. Marxism and Maoism, which I
used to believe were the only hope for the human race, became every bit
as prone to irrational beliefs as Judaism, Catholicism and Mormonism
ever were. I don't know how things are in Europe, but here in North
America, leftists are every bit as prone to mindless and uncritical
repetition of mantras and other gibberish as the most unsophisticated
villager in medieval Tibet. There is no evidence whatsoever that I can
see that would support the belief that there is any hope for the human
race. Go kiss your grandchildren now. The chances that they will grow up
to have children of their own are very poor indeed.

> In fact it's not very difficult: we can maintain all religions, but we
> have to let go of truth. Believe anything you want, but accept that
> it's not the truth. 

Nice joke. The problem is, if I may take your joke a little too
seriously, that it is in the very nature of belief that one practicing
it thinks the content of a sincerely held belief is the truth. So what
we really need to let go of is belief. I'm all for that. Indeed, no
schools of ancient philosophy appeal to me more than the various forms
of skepticism. The managed to incorporate the best of the Cynics and the
Stoics, or so it seems to me. In India the carvakas and the Madhyamaka
Buddhists came close to achieving the same lofty heights.

> Leave this idea of one and only eternal unchanging truth behind. 

I think you might have better luck convincing people to give up sex and
food. Most people, as the evidence of polls indicates, would rather die
than give up their beliefs. And even more would rather kill than die. So
I think it is pretty likely that we will all die in a bloodbath in which
90% of the human race will be able to justify every last drop of spilled
blood as necessary to defend the God-fearing from infidels.

> Let religion be your lifestyle, but place ethics above religion, so
> that nobody hinders anybody in his or her lifestyle.

Alas, this formula has been tried. What it led to in the United States
is the return of a more robust species of fundamentalism.

> See also: Collins, Steven "What are Buddhists doing when they deny a
> self?" in  _Religion and Practical Reason_  (ed. Reynolds, Frank E.
> and Tracy, David), State University of New York Press, 1994.

The American philosopher Kripke once quipped in a typical Kripke quip:
"The problem with doing philosophy in the 20th century is that all the
sensible positions have already been taken. The only unoccupied
positions left for us to defend are nonsense." One could caricature
Collins's position as saying something along the same lines: by the time
the Buddhists got on the scene, all the sensible positions had been
taken, leaving the Buddhist scholastics with nothing but a rather
extreme form of the anaatman doctrine to defend. I think the Buddhist
scholastics did their best, but I have become increasingly unsatisfied
with their position.

> Unitarians are scary - I'm never sure just what they want to unite

As I'm sure you are aware, the original unitarians were so called
because they rejected the doctrine of the trinity. The first unitarians
were scary only to trinitarians. There are still some unitarian
movements that arrive at the same position as the first unitarians that
haunted the north of Italy and the mountains of Transylvania some five
hundred years ago. The Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, are unitarians.
Like the original unitarians, they arrive at their position through
biblical literalism. Their "thinking" (if one can call it that) is that
there is no biblical support for the doctrine of the trinity. Moreover,
the Bible does say that one should not place anyone on an equal footing
with God, from which it follows that seeing Christ as a person of God is
idolatry. So their claim is that the doctrine of the trinity is the work
of the later church, in much the same way Ken Wheeler (along with some
former subscribers to buddha-l) claim that the doctrine that there is no
self is the work of the later Buddhist community. The idea that a
religious community overturns the highest insights of its founders is
nothing new. It seems to be one of the standard positions that somebody
or other eventually takes up in every organized religion. In the 19th
century, quite a number of Presbyterians, Baptists and
Congregationalists were unitarians. While Presbyterians, Baptists and
Congregationalists are all capable of being scary, I'm not sure it's
their adherence to unitarian principles that makes them so.

> I have no problem with someone proposing that I have some
> individual essence that I don't know that I have and that my
> belief in their beliefs will determine whether that unknown
> something will be either barbecued or bored for all eternity
> in a place I don't know exists. 

My main problem with unitarians is that they believe in the complete
unity of just one god, which is one too many gods for my tastes. On the
other hand, if there were a god anything at all like worthy of worship,
she would be one who confers salvation upon absolutely everyone, without
exception. I am quite drawn to some of the doctrines of Hosea Ballou and
other Universalists, who denied that anyone goes to hell or purgatory.
If God has the power to save souls, Ballou argued, and if God extends
grace to anyone at all, then it only stands to reason that a just and
powerful God necessarily extend grace to everyone. Ballou regarded the
doctrine of eternal damnation the most irrational and tragic theological
doctrine ever to be invented by deluded human beings. Unfortunately,
most American Christians were so addicted to the idea that people who
spend sixty years being sinful now and then must spend everlasting time
paying for their handful of sins in hell that they rejected the
Universalists and even persecuted them. Alas, the beleaguered
Universalists were eventually driven to form a union with those of 
their former enemies who hated them the least, namely, the Unitarians 
(most of whom were also unitarians).  

Unitarian-Universalists often operate under the delusion that they have
a great deal in common with Buddhists. But that is mostly because it
turns out they know almost nothing about Buddhism and so can protect
their warm and fuzzy sense camaraderie under the accommodating cloak 
of ignorance.

> Isn't going armed, being prepared for a shooting, having some degree of
> violent thinking?

In just about any country on this planet, it is obvious to most people
that bearing arms is a preparedness for violence and that such
preparedness is contrary to the advice of most ethical teachers.

> When I was in a taxi a couple of days ago, I sat on leather seats. I am aware 
> that an animal had to die (or, most probably, be killed) so that I could 
> sit on a leather seat.  So, through the supply chain of taxi-driver, car 
> manufacturer, tanner and slaughterer, I am now causing the death of some 
> cow in the future because I took a ride in a taxi with leather seats.

No, that would be neurotic guilt. If you bought a car with leather
seats, however, that might be a better example of something for which
you have have to take some responsibility (if your goal was to be
compliant with Buddhist principles about karma). You might also take
some responsibility for taking a taxi that pollutes the atmosphere
instead of walking or riding a bicycle.

> So, I find it rather difficult to see where to draw the line here. 

Welcome to being human. We all find it difficult to know where to draw
the line. And therefore most of us suffer.

> With no evil intentions at all I cannot help asking any vegetarian who 
> keeps carnivorous pets: What is better about supporting the death of 
> animals to feed your pets than doing so for your own food? 

Several friends of mine who are vegetarian feeds their dogs and cats
nothing but rice and lentils. The pets seem to do pretty well on that
fare. Our dogs loves broccoli (but see how naughty he is in the passage
that follows).

> Do dogs collect bad kharma for eating meat? and if not, why not?

Our dog has taken to catching mice. He doesn't seem to realize that he
is supposed to kill them. He just walks around with them in his mouth
until they either drown or suffocate, and then he buries them under a
pillow. (I have trained him to bury mice under Judy's pillow rather than mine.)

Somewhat more troubling to me is that our cat kills birds. She kills the
very birds that we take care to feed. The birds spill a lot of the seed
we put out for them, and that attracts mice. All things are interconnected.

Your question about karma never occurs to me, because I just don't use
the language of karma much, except when I'm trying to talk to Buddhists
in terms even they can understand. I do, however, give some thought to
the way I feel when my dog kills mice and my cat kills birds. I don't
like it much. But why? It makes no sense not to like it. It is my
problem, not theirs. Indeed, it is stupidity on my part, and lack of
true compassion and impartiality, to be annoyed when our cat kills a
bird. (When I get really annoyed, it's not our cat, but Judy's.) 

A truly compassionate attitude would be to rejoice at the merits of my
cat for being so good at being a cat and getting something that she
obviously treasures, while feeling compassion for the bird who has died
in the cat's clutches. My aim now is to progress to the stage where I
can just watch the cat catch birds that I feed and feel simultaneous 
joy and commiseration.

> I have always been puzzled by this and have never had an answer that 
> seemed satisfactory.

If you ever do get an answer that seems satisfactory, be suspicious of it.

In the hope that this will not be too abrupt a transition, I have
derived much benefit from thinking about the writings of James Hollis,
many of whose books I have read, one in particular that I loved being
entitled Swamplands of the Soul. It is an exploration of the benefit one
can derive by reflecting on the various ways in which we feel
psychologically uncomfortable. 

Hollis says about melancholy that it is an especially rich mode, since
it is a feeling we get when we look at the world around us and say "This
really is too bad." It's too bad that nothing at all can live unless
something else dies to provide it food. It's too bad that no mouse or
bird ever lived in a natural setting to be old enough to die of cancer
or Alzheimer's disease. It's too bad we humans are so attached to life
that we continue living long after our children no longer need us. It's
too bad that children die young and that old men didn't. It's too bad
the questions that are most interesting and urgently in need of answers
never do get satisfactory answers. 

> Maybe there will be a day when vegans harangue vegetarian Buddhists for 
> causing suffering to animals by eating their produce.  

That day has already come. Read the last chapter of the Lankavatara
Sutra and the Shurangama Sutra for relentless denunciations of meat-
eating and honey-licking Buddhists. Here we can find pronouncements that
those who teach that the Buddha allowed eating meat under certain
circumstances are thieves who are stealing from their disciples the
possibility of attaining enlightenment and that these teachers will
surely go to hell.

We could also mention Ambedkar's imaginative thesis that meat-eating
Buddhists were so despised by both Buddhists and Brahmans that they
evolved into the untouchables.

> Then maybe there will be a day when people who do not eat root
> vegetables harangue those who do because of the suffering it causes to
> creatures in the earth.

The argument against eating root vegetables (which are also banned in
the Lankavatara and Shurangama Sutras, by the way) is that the root
contains the life force of a plant. To eat a fruit or a leaf from a
plant leaves the plant alive, while eating a root kills the whole plant.

Harangues and denunciations are pretty ugly in any religious tradition.
The grotesque harangues in parts of the Lankavatara, the Shurangama and
the Lotus Sutra are as ugly to me as some of the ghastly material in the
books of Samuel, Judges and Kings and the book of revelations in the Bible.

> But what strikes me about this particular chapter is the vehemence - and 
> the almost campaigning nature, against meat eating in any circumstances. 
> This is quite unlike other texts purporting to be the Buddha's words.

I agree that the text is vehement and offers far more threats than it
offers reasons. As I said earlier, I find it an ugly text. The
Shurangama is even more strident and shrill than the Lankavatara. It is
not easy to warm up to these texts. It is also impossible to deny their
importance in forming Buddhist theory and practice in those areas in
which the texts were important, which was mostly East Asia.

> It is for this reason that I do not find it convincing.  

I'm not clear on what you mean exactly by "this reason". Do you mean
that you do not find these texts convincing because they do not sound
like the version of the Buddha to which you have come to be somewhat
attached? Perhaps you do not like them because they offer a suggestion
that makes you uncomfortable and to which you therefore have some resistance. 

As I'm sure no one has to tell you, a far better practice now would be
to examine your own attachments and forms of resistance than to find
ways of explaining away the sutras that annoy you.

If you enjoy reading hypotheses about what social and political contexts
these vegetarian sutras manifest, do consider Ambedkar's hypothesis that
the Brahmans, the Jainas and the Buddhists got caught up in a rhetorical
storm of spiritual one-ups-manship. Buddhists annoyed the Brahmans by
condemning animal sacrifices. The Brahmans retaliated by criticizing
Buddhist monks for eating meat under certain specified conditions. The
Buddhists raise the ante by saying that only pseudo-Buddhists had ever
spread the filthy lie that the Buddha allowed meat to be eaten under
certain specified circumstances. So some Buddhists had to be sacrificed
to save Buddhism from Brahman critics. 

Ambedkar offers an interesting hypothesis. But how far does it get any
of us in thinking clearly about the decision we have to make the next
time we pass the meat counter in a market? Surely it is that task, the
task of thinking clearly about the consequences of our actions, that
demands our energy more than the task of deciding which Buddhist texts
may be forgeries.

> Do you even know how many animals are murdered each year for human 
> consumption ?  In the US alone, over 9.4 billion animals per annun 
> (2.5 million per day) !

Sometimes I find it useful to think of this in human equivalents. For
example, the number of animals killed every day in America is about five
times the human population of the city in which I now live. It's about
the same as the human population of Montreal. My guess is that if a city
the size of Montreal were destroyed every day, people might begin to
think something was amiss. 

> The Buddha recommended eating but warned against killing. Eating meat is 
> not bad karma - because there is no harmful mind, no harmful word and no 
> harmful action. Killing to eat or ordering others to kill to eat, is bad karma.

Of course if someone gives you some meat, eat it. Or if a rabbit jumps
into your cooking pot and offers himself as a gift, eat it. But buying
meat is a way of ordering others to kill animals, unless you're naive
enough to think people would go around killing animals if there were no
market for the meat.

> If one buys meat, it is the intention and action of the butcher etc.
> that determines if he kills. No order is given. Such an order would be
> just an imputation from the butcher's side.

This sounds like the thinking of someone who wants to eat meat and
doesn't want to acknowledge that the decision to do so results in the
unnecessary killing of animals. What I would prefer to do is just to
acknowledge responsibility for being a significant part of an
unwholesome and harmful process and that my own attachments are a factor
in my participating in it. Nothing wrong with being honest.

> Many years ago, before I encountered Buddhism, I used to live in a small 
> hotel  where I was working in south Germany.  The hotel had a fish tank. 
> One could select a fish to eat.  I couldn't do that, but I felt OK about 
> ordering fish or meat on the menu that did not have to be killed for me.

I can't see any difference at all. That's the kind of rationalization
that enables all manner of harmful conduct to go unchecked.

> This was my instinct at the time, and it still is. Reading that karma is 
> occasioned by actions through one's three doors - body, speech, mind -
> I think it is a reasonable approach.

Well, that kind of thinking may have worked well enough a thousand years
ago, but it is just not good enough for the world in which we live
today. If you are going to think in terms of karma at all, you really
must think in terms of interconnectedness, and that means taking at
least some responsibility for every unwholesome act that you could
prevent but choose not to prevent.

> I don't eat very much meat, but when I do, I don't think my actions of
> body, speech and mind are bad.

It is not a matter of seeing anything as good or bad. Rather, it is a
matter of noting that there is suffering in the world and that one is
doing one's part in contributing to it and then being willing to
consider trying to act in ways that reduce the contribution one is
making to the unnecessary suffering that sentient beings suffer. Clarity
of mind, honest and mindfulness do not require feeling guilty; indeed,
feelings of guilt may cloud the mind more than clarifying it.

As long as we are disclosing our personal habits, nowadays I eat fish
and chicken from time to time. I don't, however, try to justify it. I
see it as about the same as when I used to smoke tobacco, even though I
also firmly believed it was causing myself and others quite a lot of
avoidable suffering. 

There is such a thing as weakness of will. When one has it, one causes
suffering. There is no need to see that as morally blameworthy, but it
does not hurt to recognize that it's too bad that things work out this
way. Far more productive that blaming oneself and others who have
weakness of character, I think, is rejoicing that there are people
around us who are strong in ways in which we are weak and that we may,
in time, cultivate more strength in ourselves by seeing those who are
around us.

> This is precisely the point. Friends of mine are vegetarians because it 
> appears to them, intellectually and emotionally,  to be the only way to 
> eat that is compatible with bodhicitta. I appreciate that. All I say is 
> that this is not universally true, and others do not accumulate any bad 
> karma because they behave differently.

Jesus, Mike, forget about karma. You've got an obsession with karma.
You'll never get anywhere if all you can think about is karma. You're
thinking like a bloody chartered accountant. Just set the karmic issue
aside and explain (quietly to yourself) why you think that eating meat
enhances the quality of your bodhicitta. And then ask yourself to what
extent you are making a rationalization, as opposed to being rational
and true to your convictions.

> It is this multitude of dependencies that, I feel, are hard to reconcile 
> with one's own actions of body, speech and mind. Is it through these one 
> accumulates good or bad karma? 

It is thinking in terms of individuality that creates most of the
problems we face.

>  Or is it by any interdependency with any evil act in the world. 

Yes.

> If it were the latter, we would all be doomed.

I'm sorry to be the one to have to point this out, Mike, but in fact we
have all already been doomed. And we'll stay doomed as long as we think
in these simplistic terms of things like individualistic karma and
karma-vipaaka.

> However,  I still read the meat-eating as something that may degrade the 
> individual - not something of karmic (blameable) nature. 

Degrading the individual is exactly what any kind of unwholesome karma
does. It has nothing to do with blame. It has everything to do with
consequences. If it does harm to self or others, it is unwholesome and
its ripening is degradation.

You might want to reread the karma chapter of the Ahidharmakosha, where
there is a lengthy discussion of the karmic consequences of having
another do an act for one. If you have someone else act on your behalf,
even indirectly, you increase the bad karma of two people: yourself and
the person who acted on your behalf. Think - if you'd like to eat meat,
for whatever reason, you should at least have the decency to kill the
animals yourself. Then only you get degraded, instead of you and your
local butcher (and the workers at the killing plant, and the driver who
transported the doomed cattle from the ranch to the abattoir, and the rancher). 

> I find it hard to accept that one being reaps the result of another being's action.

Ordering (or asking) someone to do something is an action. So when one
asks another to do something, one gets the effects of the action as if
one did the action oneself, and the person who carries out the order
also gets the consequences of the action. The example in the AbhK is
person A asking person B to kill A's mother. Killing one's own mother,
of course, is one of the five grave sins. So if A gets B to kill A's
mother, it would seem as though neither one is killing his own mother.
But since A gives the order, A gets the karma of killing his own mother,
and B gets the karma of killing someone. So A gets the heavier karmic
burden, even though B does the deed.

> Firstly, I was under the impression that it is the intent behind an act that
> counts, not so much the act itself. 

Both intention and the act itself are important. But you are right that
the more important factor is intention.

> Thirdly, a lot of writers on Buddhism (and Hinduism) seem to use "karma" as
> the term for the result of action.  I've been taught that karma was
> "action".  It is the term for the act, the doing, and not the term for the
> result of the action.  The result is "karma vipaka", the fruits of karma.

Yes, that is correct. 

> Also that in Buddhism (though not Hinduism), "karma" refers to acts of the
> mind instead of physical as any physical act first occurs in the mind.

In both Hinduism and Buddhism, karma refers to mental actions 
(including intentions) and the bodily and verbal conduct that results.

> I can't remember any members here using the term karma vipaka.

For twelve years I have been nagging people to use that term (or its
translation, ripening of karma) when it is appropriate. Thank you for
yet another gentle reminder. 

> However I also have it that Yogacara is Mahayana.  Is this correct?  
> I'm having trouble putting all this together. 

Quite honestly, it's not worth the bother. The attempt to place people
into schools is artificial in the extreme. The very idea of schools may
have made some sense one thousand years ago in India, but now it really
has no relevance at all, because none of those schools still exists.

> Why do you consider getting rid of pests a kind of aversion
> rather than prudent or wise? I agree that termites are just doing what
> termites do but wouldn't it be considered wise to stop them from doing so.

It all hinges on what kind of wisdom you are talking about. If you are
talking about a banker's wisdom, then protecting your investment is
wise. If you are talking about the Buddha's wisdom of renunciation, 
then protecting your house is a form of attachment.

> The act is done to save the house, not to kill the termites.

If the act is done to save the house, that is attachment. If the method
of saving the house is to kill termites, then your intention is to kill
the termites, and that is aversion.

> Wouldn't this apply to anyone who is forced to act in defence?

No one is forced to do anything. If you choose to act in self defense,
and if so doing entails killing someone, then you are choosing to kill
someone. That person is no less dead because you killed her in self-
defense. And the reason you chose to kill the person does not in any way
alter the act that your intention was to kill her. I am afraid there is
no getting off the hook. Any attempt to do so is nothing but
rationalization, and that is ignorance.

So you save your life (which manifests your attachment) by killing
another (which manifests aversion), and then you rationalize it (which
manifests delusion). You just drew the card that says "Go directly to
dukkha. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200."

> Hmmm, are pacifists against the "violence" of anti-biotics?

The pacifists I know are opposed to unnecessary killing. Of course there
are plenty of disagreements about what killing is unnecessary. My own
position is that no taking of human life is ever necessary, and so I
oppose all wars and the death penalty. But when I have the misfortune to
live in a society that goes to war and executes criminals, my opposition
takes the feeble form of speaking out against the practices and trying
to persuade others.  I also find the killing of animals unnecessary in
the sense that it is perfectly possible to survive, and even to thrive,
without it. As for antibiotics, I personally have resisted using them
most of the time, but I have taken courses of them to combat especially
strong infections that I have acquired in Asia. Of course I realize that
taking antibiotics is killing organisms and is therefore an action to
which I am opposed, and I see this as a sign that I still have
attachments and take it for granted that those attachments will cause me
my share of dukkha. I look forward to the day when I have eliminated
those attachments and can die with equanimity of whatever 
micro-organism comes my way.

>  How about the "violence" of that mass murderer: the immune 
> system? What is the "justification" for defending oneself against diseases?

To defend oneself is a form of attachment. There is no justification 
for it, nor is there a need for one.

> Can someone give me (or point me to) a good description of what makes 
> "vipassana" meditation unique -- or what differentiates it from, say, 
> Zen meditation?

The best source I have found is Henepola Gunaratana's books. A simple
one is called Mindfulness in Plain English. A more extensive book is 
his Path of Serenity and Insight.

Vipassana is not a meditative technique. Rather, it is a goal, namely,
the goal of clearly seeing the marks of all phenomena, namely,
unsatisfactoriness, impermanence, and non-self. If you do a meditative
exercise, such as following the breath, for the sake of seeing these
marks, then it is vipassana meditation. If you follow the breath for the
sake of calming the mind, then it is serenity meditation. The meditative
exercise is the same in each case, but the purpose for doing it differs.
Meditating in order to experience calm brings temporary relief from
dukkha, while vipassana works at eliminating the root causes of dukkha.  

>  I have read descriptions of vipassana meditation, which 
> is sometimes called "insight meditation," but the 
> descriptions/prescriptions seem to differ very little from what I've 
> read (and experienced) of the Zen approach. Is there a difference of 
> focus, or emphasis?

Not really. There is just more mumbo jumbo about enlightenment in Zen,
in addition to which you have to put up with a totalitarian master who
abuses you and tells you it is good for you. If the goal is to become
liberated form dukkha, vipassana is the method of choice. If your goal
is to become an obedient robot, go for Zen.

> The term "intellectual property" is a recent invention and hardly
> existed---if it did exist at all---in the mid-fifties of the last
> century when I went to law school.  It is a rhetorical device to
> lump together various legal tools that allow one person to control
> what others may think or may do with their thoughts and then to
> say that if someone avoids those controls he is a thief stealing
> the "property" of the person who claims the legal right to control
> the "thief's" thoughts.

Thanks for the summary, Peter. It is good to hear about this from an
expert in law. My own experience with the concept of "intellectual
property" comes from sitting on the university senate computer policy
committee (a hell realm for some undisclosed sin I must have committed
in a past life). We spent a great deal of time listening to the
university's lawyers explaining why any potentially lucrative work
professors did while being paid by the university was owned by the
university, while any crime committed while doing lucrative work was 
the professor's responsibility. The message, in short, was: 
The Company Wins Every Time.

> The oldest and, even today, often the most effective way of protecting 
> ideas from others is to keep them secret.

It is not at all clear whether the prevailing ethos of the modern
academy is "Publish or perish" or "Be secretive or be screwed."

> Looking at what Buddhists actually do is more important than is ever
> acknowledged by the people who insist that "Buddhism is inherently
> pacifist".

Looking at what any group of people actually does is the worst place to
look for what they ought to do. If one looked. for example, at what
Americans do, one would have to conclude that the Constitution requires
invading foreign countries for no defensible reason, detaining suspected
enemies of the government indefinitely without trial, and passing laws
that place no obstacles at all in the way of major corporations while
making it almost impossible for the poor to make a legal living.

>  But the "Buddhism is inherently pacifist" argument largely 
> consists of quotations intended to convince to us that Buddhists were 
> always supposed to "believe" that all violence is wrong (and please pay 
> no attention to all those piles of dead bodies over there.)

You misconstrue the argument made for pacifism. This argument is rather
simple and has nothing at all to do with belief. It has everything to do
with practice based on the observation that harming others causes
dukkha. And since the objective of Buddhist practice is to avoid dukkha,
harming others is inconsistent with positively effective Buddhist
practice. That is not a creed. It is a sample of applying elementary logic.

> That argument, by the way, has the, hopefully unintended, side-effect of 
> promoting a view of Buddhists as the most hypocritical people in the 
> history of hypocrisy.

Not really. It simply makes it obvious that Buddhists have not been much
better than anyone else at following the practices recommended for them. 

> Even more embarrassingly, it puts its proponents in the position of
> being the ones who are going to explain what Buddhism is really
> supposed to be - to people who have been practicing it for 2500 years.

Not at all. Rather, it puts people who understand the practice and
follow it in the position of offering help to those who have failed to
understand the practice and to follow it.

> You don't need a Buddhist to tell you what you will find when you
> already know exactly what you are looking for.

Quite true. If one does not look for a non-violent way of being in the
world, one will never find it. Buddhists have no monopoly on that
insight, nor have they claimed to have one. 

> Roman Catholicism, at least the old, pre-Vatican II style (Latin Mass,
> incense, and all, in which I was raised) is a wonderful religion 
> IF AND ONLY IF you take away the male-dominated hierarchy, 
> fixations on guilt, and the notions of sin. 

In other words, Roman Catholicism would be just fine if it were Liberal
Protestantism or Unitarian Universalism. 

Similarly, Theravada Buddhism would be just fine if it weren't for the
exclusively male sangha, the inequality of monks and the laity, the
fixation on nirvana and the dogmas of karma and rebirth.

> If I understand you both well, you would let loved ones suffer rather
> than damage your own purity. Is this typical of Buddhist moral thinking?

It has nothing to do with purity. Buddhist moral thinking is based on
upekkhaa (non-partiality). If something is threatening my life, or the
life of a loved one, then someone is going to die. If I kill the
aggressor, then someone is going to die. In either case, somebody dies.
Why prefer one death to another? Just let things happen as they may.
That is Buddhist moral thinking. (Read your Shantideva.)

> I'm  not afraid of death. That's not my problem. I'm
> afraid  of  having to live according to the values that
> others try to force me to live by. I will not allow it.

My guess is that you probably do allow it in more ways than you are
willing to admit. Are you allowing yourself to live in a globalized
economy in which your every choice is dictated by the interests of
international corporations and by the paranoid fantasies of an American
administration that has lost all touch with reality? Or are you, like
some of the rest of us, just helplessly enduring it?

> I liked the previous tests, but the "Belief-o-Matic" really knocked my 
> spiritual socks off. Indeed, I can't decide which freaks me out more: 
> that Mainline Protestantism outscored Theravada Buddhism, or all of 
> these and MORMONISM outscored Mahayana Buddhism.

If it's any consolation to you, it was Mainline to Liberal Protestantism
that scored above Theravada. That is not surprising to me at all,
perhaps Liberal Protestantism eschews creeds and dogma, downplays the
importance of salvation through the crucifixion of Jesus and stresses
instead the example of Jesus as a human being, emphasizes social and
economic justice and personal moral integrity, respects science and
shows complete acceptance of other religions. It was against Liberal
Protestantism that Fundamentalism began to define itself

> My own little attitudes were just not being mapped onto the answers,
> and surely I'm not *that* unusual?

My guess would be that most subscribers to buddha-l would report the
same thing. The test reminded me of an analogy I have heard several
Vietnamese Buddhists use. They say that Americans kept wanting to know
whether Vietnamese Buddhists preferred capitalism or communism. This
question, they claim, is like asking a person who does not drink alcohol
whether they prefer wine, beer or whiskey.

> When I spoke of people not appreciating such sparring, I was thinking of 
> a few men in particular, but I can also recollect women as well.

It has been my practice for as long as I can remember not to spar with
people who don't enjoy it. I have always tried to be careful about this,
even in e-mail forums. What seems to me over the top is when people
complain about witnessing sparring behavior in others, as if it offends
them to see anyone tease anyone. Complaining about having to witness
people engaging in verbal horseplay is not offering reminders about
right speech; it is humorless meddling.

> Also I consider "pacifism" or non-violence if you prefer an essential 
> and even constitutional part of Buddhism (even though it is more 
> pronounced in Jainism). Without it, I wouldn't recognise it as Buddhism.

I agree. As the saying goes "There are things I would die for, but there
is nothing I would kill for." If the price to pay in defending non-
violence is my own death, so be it. And if Buddhism is eliminated by
aggressors, I'd rather see it perish that way that to perish by
defending itself in a way that is a betrayal of its own basic principles.

> The idea that pacifism is essential to Buddhism is a very recent idea, 
> as far as I know. 

So what? It's the right idea. If it took Buddhists a long time to catch
on to the full implications of the Buddha's teachings, then all I can
say is "Better late than never."

> I must admit my answer seems a trifle loose and fuzzy, even to me. 
> Still, I'll throw it out there and say it seems to me that a Buddhist 
> environment ought to be inclusive and appreciative. 

I think you're off to a bad start. There is no reason why a Buddhist
environment ought to be inclusive. The Buddha never set out to make an
inclusive path. He set out to make a path for people who were convinced
that renunciation is the best way to attain dukkha-nirodha. That
excludes about 99% of the human race.

Several years ago, I presented a paper at a conference on Rita Gross's
book on Buddhism After Patriarchy. One of the points I argued in that
paper is that there is not now, and never has been, any rational reason
for Buddhism to make provisions for women. It's not as though the Buddha
taught that being a Buddhist monk is necessary to achieve dukkha-
nirodha. So excluding women is not depriving them of anything they
need. 

Moreover, the Buddha was a man and knew what a man needs to do to
achieve dukkha-nirodha. There is no way he could have known what a woman
needs to do to achieve it. Teaching women how to achieve dukkha-nirodha
is a woman's job. If women go to a man for advice on something like
that, they are bound to get inferior advice. 

It could even be argued that leaving men alone to develop in their own
way, without the distraction of women, benefits women, since it leaves
men alone to become much better men. And what could be better for women
than to have a world in which men have learned not to be the way they
usually are without the benefit of discipline? Undisciplined men tend to
be violent, to settle scores by conducting wars, and to be drunken
fools. So I submit that Buddhism would not be in the least compromised
if it were not gender inclusive; it would function quite well, and would
benefit the entire human race, if it were, like the Freemasons, an
exclusively male club dedicated to helping males be better men.

> It should embody (in our case, digitally) the compassion of hearing
> the other and wisdom of learning from the other. There are things most
> of us just can't learn from folks nearly like ourselves. 

By that logic, naturally gentle people like me should hang out with
hockey players and NASCAR drivers. No thanks. I'm quite content to seek
out my own kind and to benefit from their company by letting their best
qualities reinforce my best qualities, and by counting on them to help
me back up when I fall from nobility of conduct. 

> I am totally ignorant of the reasons why Buddhism left its homeland and 
> I don't doubt it that the advent of Islam didn't help, but I understood 
> that Buddhism has mainly itself to blame for the disappearence from its 
> homeland. 

One view is that the most important aspects of Buddhism in fact did not
disappear from its homeland at all but rather become incorporated in
Hinduism. So you could say that Buddhism disappeared because it was so
successful but had no need to insist on being identified as unique. 

There is quite a bit of evidence that Buddhism was sponsored largely by
merchants and that merchants found it to their economic advantage to be
Muslims after the Arabs set up shop in western India. So rather than
conversion by the sword, there was quite a lot of conversion by the cash
register and the tax man. When you realize that for a merchant the
values of Buddhism are hardly different at all from the values of Islam,
there is really no reason why one should stubbornly insist on being a
Buddhist. So I suspect a lot of Buddhists stopped being Buddhists
without a shred of persecution.

> Somehow its message became too subtle or complicated to appeal 
> to the masses and it was a religion based on renunciation right from the 
> start anyway.

Renunciation is never much of a crowd pleaser.

> Does anyone know any study about self-inmolation in
> the Buddhist tradition? 

A good place to start is Thich Nhat Hanh's book, Lotus in a Sea of Fire.
It is his attempt to explain to a shocked world why one of Vietnam's
most highly respected monks, known for his insight and compassion, set
himself on fire in the streets of Saigon in front of cameras that
broadcast the scene into every living room in the world. It's a 
powerful and informative read.

> The other authors originally mentioned write primarily "self-help" books - 
> they don't even qualify as "serious non-fiction".

If the Buddha had known how to write, I suspect he would have written
self-help books.

> Unlike Loy, those other authors are not in the business of producing works that 
> are intended to be intellectually challenging, to put it politely.

The older I get, the less it matters to me whether someone is
intellectually challenging. In all my years of teaching, my goal has
never been to help students develop muscular intellects. I am more
interested in presenting material to students that they can use to
figure out what it means to be a human being in a badly damaged world.
Perhaps I should have been a high school teacher, but somehow things
didn't work out that way.

> It's like the old line, "Sure it's funny--until someone gets hurt." 

Years ago I heard a fascinating interview with a Mohawk warrior, who
told the interviewer that an important part of Mohawk culture is to
tease people mercilessly. The idea is that people who cannot take being
teased cannot be trusted in tough situations. When I heard that
interview, I realized that just about my entire childhood and early
adulthood had operated on the same principle. My guess is that's because
America is also a warrior society and used to be a frontier society that
developed teasing as a means of making sure that people did not crack
under discomforts and pleasures. Interesting enough, Dreyfus wrote about
teasing and hazing as an important part of Tibetan Buddhist practice.
Again, the idea seems to be that if someone really wants to be a
bodhisattva, they have to learn to have equanimity when the going gets
tough and personal and dirty. There is a lot of this in Zen training, too.

When a person's conditioning is an atmosphere of teasing, as mine was,
then teasing becomes the normal way to do everything. It becomes the
normal way of showing respect and even affection. The more respect I
have for someone, and the more I think of them as an equal, the more
likely I am to show my respect in the form of mock abuse. (Whenever I am
nice to someone, you can bet that either I don't respect them very much,
or recognize that they are junior to me, or am trying to soften them up
so they'll give me some money.)

> In this regard, Buddha-l is a failure, not simply for the quality of the 
> discourse, but because that discourse flouts right speech. 

To my way of thinking buddha-l would be a failure if everybody just
exhibited right speech. God almighty, how bland and insipid that would
be. I'd sign off immediately if people started pussyfooting around and
licking each other's ears like a brood of lost kittens. 

> Hey, imagine that: promoting the dharma at home with a keyboard -- 
> can't beat that for lazy bodhisattva practice.

A keyboard is way too far from real human beings. You can't promote
dharma when you're as far from reality as you are when you're playing
with your goddamn computer. No, the place to promote dharma is when
you're playing with your kids, walking your dog, working with your
colleagues and showing kindness to some poor bastard who has worked up
the nerve to ask you for some money on the street.

> As to whether Richard has, or wants, a concept of culture I will
> leave to him to repond.

Gracias, amigo. Now that you ask, I have to say that I find the idea of
culture one of the most ill-founded, unscientific, hare-brained, useless
and perhaps even dangerous ideas of the 20th century. The sooner we dump
it, the better we'll all be.

> I agree that the female point-of-view is nearly completely absent on buddha-l. 

Yes, but so is the male point of view. The fact is that points of view
are points of view and that there is no such thing as male and female
points of view.

> The difference between the male and female point of view is the 
> difference between the point of view (pov) of the oppressor and the 
> oppressed.

What nonsense. I have never felt oppressed by women, although I have
felt dominated by a few. But that's only because I'm rather shy and
retiring and can easily be dominated by anyone who is aggressive.

Generally speaking, I think an analysis that begins with this false
dichotomy of oppressor/oppressed is going to end up being a very poor
one. The truth is we all have oppressive moments and we are all at times
oppressed. No one falls neatly into one category or the other.

> There is content and then there is method.  Perhaps this is Richard's 
> subtle Buddhist way of getting others who disagree with his content to 
> breathe and meditate?

My guess is that everyone is either dead or breathing without any
encouragement from me. You are right, however, that it is never far from
my mind to encourage people to meditate on the causes of dukkha and on
how it might be eliminated. Given that we live in a world in which there
is a lot of dukkha that could be eliminated if people thought about it
and then acted on it, and given that a lot of that eliminable dukkha is
promoted by the choices that we make collectively and severally, it
never seems off-topic to me to talk about education, politics and other
institutionalized forms of promoting greed, hatred and delusion.

> However, for Buddhist practice, I consider it 
> fruitless to criticise world leaders, governments, nations etc because I 
> learn little that could help me improve own behaviour and understanding. 

Stop being so selfish, Mike. It's not all about you and your faults.
It's about identifying the root causes of dukkha and eliminating them if
possible. It goes without saying that a Buddhist should pay considerable
attention to internal attitudes that are causing dukkha to self and
others, but why would one stop there? If once you have seen that your
own greed, hatred and delusion create problems, why not help others see
that institutionalized forms of greed, hatred and delusion create even
bigger problems? Why not point out that the decisions made by the
leadership of some nations promotes greed, hatred and delusion in its
citizens? Frankly, I would say that if your Buddhist practice does not
have a substantial dimension of helping governments and nations create
conditions that help individuals improve their individual behaviour and
understanding, then you have a very shallow Buddhist practice indeed.

> To me, such criticisms belong in the world of politics. They do not tend 
> to reduce dukkha. In many cases, they tend to increase it. I do not seek 
> to stifle political thought or action, but I do question its place here.

Why be so dualistic? What is the advantage of trying to separate the
world of politics from the enterprise of striving for self-improvement?
In a world in which everything is interconnected, how can you possibly
justify the claim that public matters have no place on a Buddhist
discussion forum?

> If I can find a certain URL I'll send it along.  The author of a highly
> informative article thereon analyzes hitherto top secret WWII U.S.
> military and politcal documents relative to the planned invasion of Japan.

While you're looking for that URL, see if you can find an on-line
version of an article written some twenty years ago that chronicles the
evolution of American thought on how many lives the bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki saved. What is interesting is that it climbs in direct
proportion to the number of deaths directly attributed to the atomic
bombs. In 1945 it was thought that the atomic bombs had saved perhaps
10,000 lives, but by 1955 the bombs had saved millions of lives. It
would not be too difficult to conclude that the number of lives saved
was more a reflection of feelings of guilt than on historical realities,
although the claim was always made that recently released top secret
documents were showing that the strength of the Japanese army, and the
fanaticism of their resolve to fight to the last infant had been
drastically underestimated. 

Another major factor, of course, was the massive paranoia being
generated during the McCarthy era. The more people gave in to mass
hysteria about the Soviet threat, the more lives the atomic bombs were
credited with saving.

> In terms of statistics it is difficult to deny that dropping the bombs saved lives.

It may be difficult for you to deny something you desperately want to
believe. But the lives allegedly saved are all hypothetical and
speculative. The lives lost were real, as were the horrible illnesses
and psychological traumas experienced by the survivors of the attack. 
To believe that the suffering caused by the bombs was in any way
justifiable is to wallow in a delusion. To the extent that that delusion
becomes a basis for justifying other wars, it is a dangerous one.

> This action spared both the Allies and the Japanese millions
> of lives that would otherwise have been lost.  Maybe this is something you
> desperately do not want to believe, or maybe you are simply encouraging
> discussion, or maybe, you're just being contrary for whatever reason.  
> I really don't know.

You're right. You don't know. So let me explain it to you again. We do
not know how many people would have died if the Americans had not
dropped atomic bombs on two non-military targets. We will never know.
All we can do is guess. What we do know is that as a result of a
decision to drop an atomic bomb in a populated area (rather than, say,
demonstrating its force by dropping it where no human beings would be
injured by it), a very large number of innocent people, nearly all of
them civilians, were killed or made very ill through radiation sickness.
I believe that to try to justify their very real suffering by appealing
to guesses and speculations about how many lives were saved, is
obscene. 

And I would add that it is morally short-sighted in the extreme to fail
to take into account that using a weapon of mass destruction against a
civilian population set a precedent that has made the world incalculably
more dangerous and that much of the danger of the world in which we now
live is a direct descendant of that awful decision to use the atomic
bomb. The USA showed itself to be a nation that would carry out two
massive terrorist attacks and would then continue to justify doing so.

> Neither Hirosshima nor Nagasaki were "completely non-military targets".

The only sense in which they were military targets is that they were
cities in a country against which a war was being conducted. I suppose
you could say that the school children who died in those attacks would
have grown up to be enemy soldiers, and the women who were killed might
have given birth to more enemy babies. Aside from that, however, they
were of no military importance. 

Indeed, if Hiroshima and Nagasaki HAD been military targets, they would
have been bombed or shelled earlier. The reason they were chosen as
targets for the atomic bombs is because they had never been bombed or
attacked in any way before; the military picked previously untouched
targets because they wished to be able to assess exactly how much damage
an atomic bomb would do. Bombing Tokyo would not have served this
purpose, because it was already so badly damaged by conventional fire
bombs. (Most of the claims made here are documented in Enola Gay by
Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts. New York: Stein and Day, 1977.)

There is a considerable literature that questions the claim that basis
of the decision to use the atomic bomb against the Japanese had anything
at all to do with Japan. There is much evidence that Japan was on the
verge of collapse and that the Allied Command expected Japan to
surrender very soon. So why use the atomic bombs? One theory is that the
bombing of Hiroshima was not meant to be the last action of the Second
War but the first action of the Cold War. The purpose of using the
bombs, according to this theory, was to sent a clear signal to Stalin
that the Americans would not hesitate to use such weapons on the Soviet
Union if they got out of line.

> ...echoing a similar capitulation to the current revisionistic version of
> American history touted by the religious right reiterated last Sunday in the
> lead article in the New York Times Magazine. 

Actually, my source for this was Sidney Ahlstrom's A Religious
History of the American People, considered by many the definitive
work on the topic. Ahlstrom chronicles a movement of Christians in
England who saw England as the land from which the light of the gospels
would spread to all nations. When they moved to the Americas, they saw
the new world as the New Jerusalem. This is pretty well attested. The
religious right of our times, of course, has rediscovered that
enthusiasm of the early Puritans and exploited it for their own
purposes. 

> By the time representatives of the
> colonies convened to hash out a Constitution, the de facto reality on the
> ground was that numerous religious groups had claimed wide swatches of
> territory for their own religion, and were loathe to share that with
> alternate religious persuasions.

That is not quite the case. Many of the swatches of land were de jure
territories, but not de facto at all. A case in point was Pennsylvania,
a land given by the British crown to Penn, the pacifist son of the
admiral who conquered Jamaica. Penn by that time had become a Quaker.
The Quakers were not welcome in many places in the Americas. Some states
had laws advocating the death penalty for anyone who knowingly
associated with or did business with Quakers, and there were a number of
public executions in Boston in which Quaker women were whipped and then
hanged in the public squares. Pennsylvania Quakers tended to be pretty
tolerant of others, as a result of which Pennsylvania was rapidly
populated by folks who were not tolerated elsewhere in the colonies.
Famously Pennsylvania became the home of many German pietists and
anabaptists, such as the followers of Menno Simons and Jakob Hutter.

>True, to some extent. The Quakers did tolerate some others (and became the
>new homeland for the Pennsylvania Dutch [actually Deutsch, i.e., German] and
>apple butter), but they were also intolerant of still others. They
>eventually even became intolerant of their own, leading to a division
>between the Eastern Quakers, and the more Protestantized variety (who live
>in different places from each other today, the latter in the Midwest, rather
>than PA).

You have now jumped ahead some two hundred years, to the mid-nineteenth 
century, the time of the so-called Holiness movement. It was then that 
evangelical Quakers abandoned the older Quaker principles of the silent 
meeting of worship and the pacifist testimony and developed an ordained 
clergy and such oddball innovations as hymns and altars. This 
evangelical wing was not warmly received by traditional Quakers, but 
they were certainly not persecuted or shunned. When one considers that 
Richard Nixon was from this evangelical branch of the Quakers, it is 
not surprising that the paficist Quakers felt the evangelicals were not 
speaking to their condition. But it would be going too far to say that 
there was intolerance on the part of either branch toward the other. 
The relations between the two branches of Quakers were never as frosty 
as the relations between followers of Shinran and followers of 
Nichiren, or as the relations between traditional dGe-lugs-pas and the 
followers of NKT. If you want to see some real hostility, you'll do 
better to look at Buddhists than at Quakers.

> Put another way, poetry is a shared incoherence.

No, it's solepsistic incoherence. It is hot blasts of asmitaa.

> Richard himself suggests this answer when he demands an explanation of 
> "why any Buddhist would listen to music for the purpose of being moved 
> by it." The answer lies precisely in this experience of being moved: in 
> being so moved, one is partially broken out of one's illusory sense of 
> separateness and experiences greater intimacy with one's world. Far 
> from doing "damage to the quality of one's soul," as Richard (I 
> suspect, playfully) puts it, I assert such experience of reading or 
> hearing poetry can bring one just a bit closer to kilesa-nirodha. 

I'm afraid I must disagree with this rather strenuously. As a reformed
musician, I am well aware of the potential of music to provide a brief
respite from the kilesas. It is very easy to "lose oneself" in music,
and that sounds like a good thing, from a Buddhist point of view. But
the loss tends to be quite temporary and thus is rather more like a
distraction from the task of attaining kilesa-nirodha than a means of
doing it. Music, I think, has many addictive properties. It provides a
temporary respite, as a result of which one keeps going back to it again
and again, but with diminished effect.

It is perhaps no accident that so many of the world's great musicians
(including Mr Dylan) have been alcoholics and/or drug addicts and have
led dissolute lives. Their lives are often testimonials to the dukkha
that goes with taking false refuge. So I remain unconvinced that music
has any dharmic value.

Less someone be tempted to imagine that my next move is going to be to
hijack an airplane and fly it into the recording studios of Columbia
records, I should perhaps add that I have never believed in imposing
discipline onto others involuntarily. While I find myself less and less
inclined to listen to music (and have not played an instrument or sung
for decades), I am not at all advocating a Taliban-like ban on all
things that do not edify. We can leave it to our Republican friends to
do that sort of thing. Still, I think it is worthy of serious reflection
to ask oneself just how much poetry and music (or, for that matter,
burning incense and chanting) do to bring one closer to nirvana.

Bhikkhu Bodhi makes the following interesting observation:

  The traditional exegesis of abstaining from idle chatter refers only to
  avoiding engagement in such talk oneself. But today it might be of value
  to give this factor a different slant, made imperative by certain
  developments peculiar to our own time, unknown in the days of the Buddha
  and the ancient commentators. This is avoiding exposure to the idle
  chatter constantly bombarding us through the new media of communication
  created by modern technology. An incredible array of devices --
  television, radio, newspapers, pulp journals, the cinema -- turns out a
  continuous stream of needless information and distracting entertainment
  the net effect of which is to leave the mind passive, vacant, and
  sterile. All these developments, naively accepted as "progress,"
  threaten to blunt our aesthetic and spiritual sensitivities and deafen
  us to the higher call of the contemplative life. Serious aspirants on
  the path to liberation have to be extremely discerning in what they
  allow themselves to be exposed to. They would greatly serve their
  aspirations by including these sources of amusement and needless
  information in the category of idle chatter (samphappalapa) and making
  an effort to avoid them.

> Capitalism is completely incompatible with Buddhism, by the way, and
> the only sound critique of Capitalism that there is is Marx's. So one
> way or the other, Marx the atheist and Buddha the agnostic must be
> somehow reconciled. 

This reconciliation has already occurred in the writings of Bhikkhu
Buddhadasa. His writings reinforced my deeply held conviction that any
Buddhist who is not a communist (not to be confused with being a
Communist) is really just fooling around.

> Lately some of us have been finding opportunities to critique current
> national affairs via a Buddhist critique as well as a Marxist or some
> other critique. That being the case, it is time, IMHO, to get real about
> what it is that is corrupting and terrorizing the ordinary peoples of
> the entire world and ruining their habitats and means of survival: the
> arms industry and trade. 

Years ago there was a book called something like "Trading with the
enemy" that chronicled all the major US corporations that supplied
materials and know-how to Hitler's Reich, not only before the second
world war but during it. The principal names were General Motors, ITT,
Standard Oil and a few others. Wal-mart didn't exist then, but I'm sure
they would have been in on the deal somehow, given how much support they
are giving to the current gang of thugs who have taken over the USA. 

After seeing how much money the blue chip corporations made by selling
goods to both Hitler and the Allies, it's not hard to jump (or take a
baby step) to the conclusion that many major corporations have no
concern whatsoever with morality and will do business with anyone who
has the cash or good credit. 

It is also apparent that it's time for Buddhists to get serious about
the central plank of all Buddhist practice, namely, renunciation, since
that is the most effective way to boycott the corporations that are
destroying our environment, undermining democracy everywhere and leaving
us all increasingly incapable of discerning truth from propaganda and
PR. (I'd say more about this, but I have to go shopping now.)

Have you ever visited the website www.misspoppy.com ? You can find there
a collection of inspirationally funny T-shirts, refrigerator magnets and
so forth. My favorite one says "Republicans are people too. Mean,
selfish, greedy people." I'd buy that one if I could find a companion
for it that said something like like "Democrats are people too.
Ineffective, gutless, incompetent people."

> How does Buddhism account for the complexity of phenomena and their
> inter-relations other than by simply asserting a form of dependent 
> co-origination? 

What need is there to account for it? Dependent origination deals with
the central problem addressed by the Buddha, namely, the origination of
discontent. This problem can be solved rather easily. Other problems are
not of much importance from a Buddhist perspective.

> Perhaps it's not such a great idea to draw the boundaries 
> exclusively--that's what the fundamentalists do, throwing people out of 
> their churches who raise unwelcome questions.

I'm all for kicking people out of a church if they cannot walk in step
with the congregation. What I am NOT for, or course, is insisting that
there be only one congregation. I see nothing wrong with each
congregation deciding who is welcome in their midst and who is unwelcome. 

In the 17th century there were few people in the Americas who were
stronger advocates of religious diversity and freedom than the Quakers.
And yet the Quakers also strongly discourage any Quaker marrying "out of
meeting." They saw no contradiction at all in advocating that Catholics,
Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians all have the right to practice
their religions openly, and in suggesting that Quakers do best when they
stay to themselves and avoid intimate contact with others. This also
makes perfect sense to me nowadays. It is also perfectly in keeping with
Buddhist principles. Nothing is seen as more important in Buddhism than
keeping company with people who will reinforce one's efforts to embody
Buddhist values and avoiding those who undermine Buddhist values.

> I try to tolerate, enjoy, and appreciate diversity, but
> not necessarily embrace or mimic it. I also attempt to be tolerant of
> intolerance.

There is nothing in life that takes up more of my energy than struggling
with this question. One of my many attempts to come to terms with it is
available on my download page at http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes/download.html. 
Look for an item entitled "Reflections on September 11, 1893," which is
the text of a guest sermon I gave at the Unitarian-Universalist
fellowship in Battlement Mesa, Colorado in 2003. You'll see that my
thinking was in a mess then, and I'm afraid it has not improved much
since that time. 

Just to clarify my position, I'm all in favor of diversity at the global
and national level. I just don't think that every individual
organization in the country can, or should even try to, reflect the
diversity of the whole. To give a biological analogy, a complex organism
such as a human being functions because it has many kinds of specialized
cells, each of which has evolved to do a particular task. If every cell
had to reflect the diversity of the organism as a whole, none of the
organs in a human being would work well, and many would not work at all.
Applied to the social level and political level, a complex country
functions best if it has the full range of societies that focus on doing
what they do: Buddhist sanghas, Presbyterian synods, Catholic dioceses,
Jewish synagogues, neo-conservative think tanks, liberal think tanks,
B'nai B'rith, the Ku Klux Klan, the Communist Party and so on. Get rid
of any of them, and the national organism is weakened and may even die.
But asking a neo-Nazi group to accept Jewish members or B'nai B'rith to
present both sides of a Palestinian suicide bombing in Jerusalem is like
asking a heart cell to have the structures of a liver cell or a motor
neuron. Bad idea.

> Why should a theory that posits accidental origination as a viable 
> explanation to the complexity of the universe be a better one than 
> a theory that posits an intelligence that in some way guides in 
> accord with this complexity all things in their complex interactions? 

The basic idea behind applying Ockham's razor to this pseudo-theory of
intelligent design is that a theory that does not posit intelligence
requires fewer assumptions to explain the same thing. The theory of
random mutation is capable of explaining everything we know of with a
bare minimum of assumptions. Nothing at all is gained by adding the
notion of intelligence to the notion of mutation, especially since the
theory of intelligent design leaves unanswered the huge question of
where the intelligence came from that allegedly guides creation. It
raises more questions than it answers. So it is an inferior position.

> According to the Pali texts the Buddha refused to speculate on such matters, 
> he had more sense than I do at the moment, but he was not faced with rapidly 
> and universally disappearing trees, land, species, water, soil, clean air.

I don't think the Buddha refused to think about such questions as what
we human beings may be doing to the biosphere. Indeed, some of the
vinaya rules are testimony to his having a remarkable amount of concern
for how people affect the world of animals, insects and plants. The
questions the Buddha did not answer were those that, if answered, would
make no difference at all to how we act. Reflecting on how human beings
are destroying the very possibility of many kinds of life on the planet
is not in that category at all. Questions of the well-being of living
things are of utmost importance to Buddhists. And that is why some of us
insist on drawing attention to barely sentient beings, such as George W.
Bush and his cohort of greed-driven, hate-filled and delusion-saturated
advisers, and to the contribution they are making to the suffering of
sentient beings everywhere in the present and in the future.

> Until westerners entered the fray, Buddhist scholarship has
> historically been based on the practice of memorizing texts word
> for word in their entirety. This was also part of the western
> intellectual tradition up through at least the Renaissance - I'm
> not sure when it became unfashionable.

After the Second World War. Several years ago I read a book on the
dumbing down of American culture. (Being a modern idiot, I can't even
remember its damn title, but I think it was High Brow Meets Low Brow.)
This book claimed that throughout the 19th century just about every
American alive could recite most of the Bible and most of the plays of
Shakespeare. It was the dread of every actor to forget a line in some
small town in Idaho, only to have every miner and lumberjack in the
audience boisterously supply the missing lines. The point of the book
was that Shakespeare was so commonly known that there was nothing
special in knowing him, but in the 20th century even a passing
acquaintance with Shakespeare became the mark of an educated 
"high-brow" person. 

Both of my grandfathers, born in the 1880s, could recite volumes of
poetry, and the speeches of famous men, and bits of Americana such as
the Declaration of Independence and most of the Constitution, until
someone begged them to stop. By the time I was in grade school (the
1950s), the art of memorization was rapidly fading. Like most kids, I
hated memorizing things, but now I'm glad I had to do at least some of
it and wish I had had to do a lot more.

> But memorization could be a great aid to this understanding - because
> it allows one to literally "hold" the entire text in one's mind - and
> to go back and forth from one part of it to another to another at will
> - at the speed of thought. 

Yes, I think this is an excellent observation. A friend of mine from
India says that no one can claim to know what a text means until she had
memorized it and replayed the memory hundreds of times.

Incidentally, another really backwards notion that we moderns have is
that only retarded people move their lips when they read. In fact,
reading aloud is an excellent practice. It forces one to interpret as
one goes and helps one retain a text. I read aloud so much (or at least
whisper as I read) that the sight of someone reading silently looks very
odd to me. It always seems as though they're not really paying attention
to what they're doing.

> Is there some accepted criterion for what "scientific evidence" for
> the "existence" of a God might look like?

Observability would be a start.

> This is clearly an example of an anti-religious bias masquerading as
> scientifical "objectivity".

Oh for heaven's sake, Curt. There is nothing in the least bit anti-
religious in making the claim that a religious dogma has no scientific
foundation. It's not even anti-religious to say a religious dogma has no
historical grounding. It's just plain straightforward to say that a
religious dogma is a religious dogma and not a scientific or historical
truth. What might make such a claim anti-religious would be to add a
gratuitious policy advocation to that straightforward claim. If, for
example, one were to add that people who act on religious dogmas should
be rounded up and shipped to Mars, THAT would perhaps be anti-religious.
Similarly, there is nothing at all biased or anti-religious in saying
that there is no historical evidence that Jesus was crucified, no
scientific evidence that the dead can be resurrected, no scientific
evidence that a personal consciousness survives the death of a body and
goes out in search of another body, and neither scientific nor
historical evidence that Yahweh gave Israel to the Hebrews for all eternity.

> The statement "there is no scientific evidence of Ram or Krishna"
> is true only in an extremely trivial sense. It is true only in so far as the
> statement "science is not able to contribute meaningfully to the question of
> whether or not deities exist" is also true. 

You find that trivial? Oddly enough, I find the claim that science has
no interest in claims that are not testable hypotheses a rather
important claim about what makes science significantly different from
religion and poetry.

> Since you admit that it is not possible to perform experiments to
> test for the existence of Deities - this means that science has nothing
> to say on the issue. 

Yes, exactly. Leave it to the poets and the preachers to speak of
deities. And leave it to people to decide how much attention they want
to give to poets and preachers.

> That is obviously not the point of the statement in question. The point 
> was that science somehow provides evidence for the non-existence of
> Ram and Krishna.

That is how you read it. I did not read it that way at all. Gee, I
wonder if this suggests that texts might have an inherent ambiguity.

> Otherwise the statement would have to read "There is no evidence for the 
> existence or non-existence of Ram and Krishna". But that's not what was said. 

Ever heard of logic, Curt? Did you know that there is a theorem in logic
that P implies P or Q? So if it is true that science has no evidence for
the existence of Rama, then it is also true that science has no evidence
for the existence or the non-existence of Rama. So the latter need not
be said, because it is perfectly obvious.

> It is fine for scientists to admit that they are not able to determine
> whether or not Gods exist - but it is not fine for school textbooks to
> teach that science disproves the existence of Gods.

True enough. Now, tell me which text books teach that science disproves
the existence of gods. I have never heard of any.

> And it is even worse for textbooks to use intentionally misleading
> language so that they can imply that science disproves the existence
> of Gods without actually coming out an saying it.

Well, the onus of proof is on you to show somehow that the wording in a
given textbook is misleading. Then you must show that it was the
intention of the authors to mislead. You have a lot of proving to do,
young fellow. May I suggest you do it on your blog? This list is for
discussing Buddhism, and we'd love to see what you have to say about that.

> I just finished reading Ken Wilber's "The Marriage of Sense and
> Soul.' In his insistence that the core of spirituality (looking
> within) leads to what he calls 'vision-logic' or transrational
> knowledge, he insists that Science needs to recognize that through
> meditation and the community of meditaters, there is a way to meet the
> basic criteria of science in terms of validity and method in
> acknowledging higher states of being (and he does mean higher than
> reason).

As soon as one begins to speak of any mode of consciousness as being
higher than any other, one has left the domain of science and entered
the domain of value judgement. It would be completely impossible for a
scientist to speak of "higher states of consciousness" without ceasing
to be a scientist. Why not just accept that reason is one way of several
ways that the mind works? On what basis would one say that any way of
using the mind is higher than reason.

I have never read anything by Wilber that struck me as worthwhile for
either the scientific life or the contemplative life. He strikes me as
pathetic hyper-narcissistic man enamored of his own brilliance. Still,
his books are so thick that they do make good footsteps when one needs
to fetch a can of pinto beans off a high shelf.

> He traces the problems with the rift between science and religion to
> Popper and Kuhn.

Popper and Kuhn were both anticipated in this by Peirce, Vaihinger and
Kant, and they were anticipated in important ways by Descartes, and he
by Aristotle. I think we can safely say that there is a long history of
a way of thinking, and of an opposition to that way of thinking, and
Wilber simply chooses sides in a very long debate that will probably
still be going on as long as there are human beings discussing such things.

> think that Wilber would call for a type of practice of meditation in
> schools as a valid tool toward understanding. He suggests that truly
> 'spiritual' people need to stand up to dogmatic myth believers and
> tell them that they need to get to the core of what it is all about
> and stand up for that -- which for wilber comes down to the validity
> of meditation that is to some degree universal in all the world
> religions.

Gee, that sounds pretty dogmatic to me. What he really advocates, it has
always seemed to me, is not transcending dogma but accepting HIS dogma.

> Wilber considers the materialistic science that we are fed in school,
> scientism -- in otherwords, as sectarian and full of myths as any
> fundamentalist religion in its insistence in that science has the
> corner on truth.

This is a very fashionable dogma these days. The problem with it, as
with most dogmas, is that there is very little evidence to support it.
Very few scientists that I know about believe that they have cornered
the market on truth. The people who say that about scientists are
usually anti-science bigots, just as those who say that Christians (or
Muslims) are predominantly intolerant fundamentalists or that liberals
are predominantly unpatriotic socialists are anti-Christian, or anti-
Muslim or anti-liberal, bigots. Wilber sometimes sounds refreshing, but
when one scratches beneath the surface, one finds the same old
prejudices hard at work.

> As for his brilliance, I have read an overview of his writings that
> said that he has an IQ of 170 and reads seven books (i think) a day.

IQ scores mean next to nothing, except how good one is at taking a very
particular kind of test. My father used to administer IQ tests to
thousands of people. Each time he gave a test, he also took it. After
about a year of doing this he raised his score by some 40 points,
bringing himself to over 100. (I've never had the opportunity to take IQ
tests several times, so I struggle with the 75 points God gave me.)

As for reading, I am more inclined to admire a person who has the
patience to take a year or so to read a book. Reading seven books a day
is just silly. Hell, after about three days one would have read every
book worth reading. What would one do then?

> When you get right down to it, what is not dogma?

The last person I heard make this kind of claim was a "news" commentator
on Fox News. He was making one unsubstantiated assertion after another.
When someone (Bill Moyers) called him on it and asked him what his
evidence was, the sly Fox said "When you get right down to it,
everything is just dogma and opinion. Whoever convinces the most people
wins elections and gets to say what the truth is." (Gee, didn't Socrates
know a guy just like that?)

> The idea that science is a way to truth is a dogma.

Yes, it is. It is not, however, what scientists usually say about their
hypotheses. They rarely say they have arrived at truth. Rather, they say
they are testing hypotheses. So the dogma you are stating is one that
non-scientists say about science, which is no more accurate than what
non-Buddhists say about Buddhism.

> Wilber simply says that meditation is a way to truth and that it has
> real results that can be verified or not within a community. No more
> or less dogmatic than the materialist scientist.

Wilber's claim about meditation is pure dogma. What a scientist says
about her work is not dogma at all. What Wilber says about science is
also dogma. For a guy with a high IQ, he sure has a hard time liberating
himself from his own prapanca. This tends to support what the Buddha
said, namely, that becoming liberated from prapanca has nothing to do
with learning the truth. It has everything to do with throwing out
opinions. This is something Wilber has not yet managed to do. Opinions
seems to stick to him like the tar baby stuck to Br'er Rabbit. This
often happens to smart people. IQ is a very sticky substance.

> was sakyamuni a "libertarian"? 

Yes, a libertarian is someone who advocates freedom, and Gautama (I
refuse to acknowledge the existence of Saksyamuni) wanted to free 
people from samsara. 

> did he advocate "free markets"?

Yes, I think he felt markets should be free of monks and others who
would only get in the way of the consumers.

> would he have enjoyed Ayn Rand's works?

I think he would have shrugged.

> would he have condemned "welfare bums"?

The term preferred in those days was bhikshu. It seems as though he
elevated welfare bums to the status of being society's true brahmans,
and devalued brahmans to the status of social parasites and charlatans.

> I believe that there is another way to look at the term "libertarian." 
>  This is within the context of discerning two strands within 
> conservatism:  the authoritarian and the libertarian.  An authoritarian 
> conservative is one who wants to tell other adults how to conduct their 
> lives (you may not take drugs, you may not gamble, you may not have 
> abortions, etc.), whereas a libertarian conservative wants to minimize 
> government control over one's personal affairs.

This controversy raged among Christians in the Americas long before any
of the countries on these continents broke away from Europe. In the 17th
century Christians divided into just the two camps you have described,
and the disputes among them were often bitter and acrimonious. Sometimes
they were so acrimonious that people were publicly flogged, even hanged,
for taking the wrong view. As far as I have read, most of the floggers
were authoritarians, and most of the floggees were latitudinarians (also
known as libertarians, or pejoratively as libertines). Things have not
changed much.  

> Some might see the latter as "compassionate," others may not.

The argument of the latitudinarians has always been that human beings
are imperfect, and God forgives them. The argument of the authoritarians
has always been that God condemns sinners, so they should be killed
before their influence contaminates the rest of society. This helps
explain why so many people who shriek about the importance of culture of
life endorse the death penalty for every crime more serious than 
licking a stamp.

> How to correlate this with Buddhist thought escapes me at the moment.

I see some signs that many Western Buddhists have taken sides in this
centuries-old dispute. It seems to me that most have taken sides with
the latitudinarian/libertarian faction, but a few (clearly the minority)
have gone the authoritarian route.

> Good - I don't want to screw up my almost perfect record of making
> consistently inaccurate observations.

It's a bad idea to be consistently inaccurate. Then people just listen
to what you say and negate it. Much better is to mix up good with bad
observations so that people have no idea whether to believe anything you
say. That forces them to think for themselves.

> Masao Abe. I have never read anything by Abe, but I did hear hims
> speak once, and I thought he was pretty boring.

Good old Honest Abe. Honest people, like accurate people, usually are
pretty boring. If you want some excitement in your life, it's liars and
wild speculators that you need.

> For some reason he served on the Advisory Board for the Washington
> Times newspaper, which always made me suspicious (the Washington
> Times is a wholly owned subsidiary of Rev. Moon's conspiracy to take
> over the world).

That a prominent Japanese Buddhist scholar would work as an adviser for
one of the most disgustingly right-wing propaganda rags in what is
jokingly called the free world is a good reminder that Buddhists are, as
a rule, inclined to lean as far to the right as possible without falling
over. That is true in all parts of the world but the West. In the West,
Buddhism is still not established, so it attracts people who are
alienated from their societies. But wherever Buddhism is a well-
established religion, it mostly attracts people who are too mired in
tradition to think for themselves and who have a fear of anything that
might make them change their deeply ingrained habits.

> I expect that western concepts of politically conservative vs
> progressive don't necessarily equate with political orientations in
> Thailand, Sri Lanka, Taiwan or wherever, anyway, so it would be very
> difficult to make such a comparison.

I don't think it's difficult at all. When I say that Asian Buddhists are
conservative, I mean conservative by Western standards. It really makes
no difference at all to me what their own standards are. Let them
evaluate themselves in their own way for their own reasons. I am a
Western person, and I will evaluate everything by the only standards
with which I am familiar.

> For example, take Sri Lanka, where there is a politicised movement
> among Buddhists that might seem xenophobic, e.g. outlawing christian
> proselytisation - but they are trying to fend off some quite
> aggressive christian missionisation. Does that make them nationalists?

Yes. There is no doubt about that. Their fear of an outside religion
makes them xenophobic. Their fear of making changes that might very well
be quite good for them makes them conservative. There is nothing less
conservative and xenophobic about a Buddhist resisting Christianity than
there is about a Christian resisting yoga or a Jew resisting Sufism or
any religious person resisting science or humanism.

> It may be the case that, in this matter, philosophical persuasion and
> ideologies have followed economic realities, but even that may be open
> to question.  

Admittedly, my principal philosophical interests have been in classical
India, so I don't claim expertise in Western philosophy. I have,
however, worked for my entire adult live in the company of students of
Western philosophy and religion, and I have never heard anything about
philosophical persuasions that pose a serious challenge to the viability
of the family. What I have read in the work of some sociologists are
reflections on why the extended family has ceased to exist. And I do
know some Western Buddhists who have argued, rather convincingly, that
the nuclear family is incapable of providing the sort of nurture that
the old extended family used to provide in my grandparents' generation.
The nuclear family is a very weak social unit, and it is not obvious
what is available to replace what it used to provide, aside from cults
and gangs.

> The present economic realities are the fruit of earlier ideologies,
> and so what is currently the articulation of a present economic
> reality follows from (or responds to) the earlier underlying
> philosophical or ideological suppositions.

True. As early as 1690 the merchants of Boston began making
representation to church elders and complaining of all the ways that the
severe ethical norms of Puritan Christianity were impeding their pursuit
of profitable trade. In a bid not to alienate the merchant class, on
whom the church had already to some extent become dependent, church
regulations were relaxed considerably. This led Cotton Mather to write
"Religion gave birth to prosperity, and then the daughter killed her
mother." Then as now, religion may have guided the American people, but
the traders and money-lenders guided the clergy. There were few
exceptions to this, because exceptions tended not to survive more than a
decade or so.

> I trust that nothing we are discussing here is unimportant for
> Buddhist scholars to consider since, as is obvious, many of them live
> in the USA and are confronted with these realities in their daily
> lives.

Buddhism in America is following all the same patterns as Christianity
in America has followed for the past nearly 375 years. This may not be
of much interest to scholars of Buddhism, but I should think it might be
interesting (in a depressing sort of way) to American Buddhists. For all
the talk of liberation and transcendence, they are stuck on the same
toxic flypaper as their Christian, Jewish and Muslim brothers and
sisters.

> Allow me briefly to think this through.  You are right to point out
> that secular humanism has made serious inroads upon the American
> religious scene, rendering it ambiguous.  The reasons why are varied,
> and to discern them is to discern even partially the social (and
> philosophically grounding) mechanisms used to advocate and propogate
> this world view.  The reasons are grounded in systemic (read
> educational and academic, judicial, commercial) attacks upon the
> family

I do not believe anyone ever set out to "attack" the family. I think the
American family fell apart all by itself. Probably the biggest factor is
the mobility of Americans. My father grew up in a big house in Michigan
in which his grandparents and several aunts and uncles and cousins
lived. My generation has been scattered to every part of this continent.
What is interesting to note is that the states in which people are most
obsessed with so-called "family values," the divorce rates are highest
as are the rates of pregnancies out of wedlock. These are also states in
which opportunities for employment tend to be less than elsewhere, and
where wages are very low. So people either stay where they are and live
in poverty, or they move on down the line. Whichever they do puts a huge
strain on the family. In this case, philosophical persuasion and
ideologies have followed economic realities rather than creating them.
(Sorry to sound so Marxist on a Buddhist forum; if it's any consolation,
I tend to prefer Weber to Marx in most matters pertaining to the
relationship between ideology and economics.) 

> an understanding of custom and tradition as oppresive horizons rather
> than as vehicles of enculturation and socialization

Outside a fairly small circle of people, I just don't believe this is a
widespread "understanding" of things. But then I hang out mostly with
people who, like me, have a very positive regard for custom and
tradition. (People tend to hang out with people with whom they agree, I
reckon.)

> the understanding of authority de facto as necessarily based on
> tyranical dominance and bureaucratic unaccountability

Again, I don't think this "understanding" is very widespread.
Admittedly, most of my friends think of Republican authority as actually
(but not necessarily) based on tyrannical dominance and bureaucratic
unaccountability. But that is only because Republicans have, since
Nixon's presidency, been far more prone than Democrats to abuse their
power. When I was a child it was the other way around. But, as the
Buddha observed long ago, things change.

> ideological and philosophical anthropologies that subordinate the
> person to the state or some one aspect of the society (the economy)

You've got to be joking, Stan! This is the United States, not Poland or
the former USSR. This country has got to be one of the most paranoid
places on earth when it comes to fearing giving powers to the state.
What I think can be said accurately is that many Americans have a deeply
irrational fear of the subordination you speak of, but it has to be
admitted that that very fear has always prevented the subordination of
which you speak. I can think of hardly anyone in the USA who advocates
such subordination. Can you?

> philosophical arguments for relativism and their implementation (via
> the educational and judicial systems)

Relativism does not need anyone to argue for it. It exists mostly
because of the dramatic failures of all claims to absolute truth. It
exists because people have for millennia tried, and consistently failed,
to defend various traditional world-views. Hardly anyone I know WANTS to
be a relativist, just as hardly anyone I know WANTS to be mortal. That
notwithstanding, some people are intellectually and emotionally honest
enough to realize that we are all mortals and that no system of absolute
values is defensible. The educational system tends to select for
intellectual honesty rather than fidelity to dogma. As for the judicial
system, it is far more prone to dogmatism than the educational system.
Just look at the voting records of the Supreme Court justices. They are
so predictable that the whole system is something of a farce. That
aside, it could hardly be said that the judicial system has implemented
relativism.

> the reduction of the person to a means of gratification, etc.

Again, this "reduction" has probably taken place pretty much by itself.
Human beings, according to almost all observers of any religious or
philosophical persuasion, are driven largely by a desire for pleasure.
Technology has delivered pleasure in an abundance that previous
generations could only dream of. If I had been writing this 50 years
ago, I would be sitting in a sweltering room trying to get a ballpoint
pen to write on sweat-stained paper. I now live two blocks from where I
lived 50 years ago, and I am sitting in an air-conditioned room using a
computer. It is quite a bit more comfortable now than things were 50
years ago. And, unfortunately, no one has been able to come up with
reasons that are powerful enough to convince people that all this
comfort they are enjoying is being bought at prices that future
generations will have to pay. This feebleness of reason has not been
anything that anyone deliberately brought about. The breakdown of
religion was not anyone's plan. It broke down because of the weight of
its own unsustainable dogmatism.

> Yes, I concede your point here, Richard, inasmuch as the organs of
> government, finance, education, the judicary, the media have ceased to
> be based on Christian principles.

Only because the Christian churches themselves ceased to be based on
Christian principles. No one set out to destroy Christian institutions.
They fell apart through the individual hypocrisy of the people whose job
it was to maintain them. How many Catholic dioceses right now are in
financial trouble because they have had to pay reparations to people who
as young boys were sexually abused by priests? It has been situations of
that sort that have made people cynical--not the government, the
educational system, the judiciary and the media. I you would like to
make things better, don't lay the blame on the wrong people. That's like
trying to mend a broken arm by putting a cast on your knee.

> It is reasonable to understand that those who ally themselves
> knowingly and willingly with the ideological and philosophical
> justifications for the current ethos of these sociological organs can
> be termed non-Christian in point of fact. 

In point of fact, a good many people who are examining the sad state of
religion and acknowledging the factors that have led to its
deterioration may seem to be allying themselves with ways of thinking
that have not in recent times been perceived as traditional
Christianity, but in fact they are deeply committed Christians who are
trying to heal a broken church and a broken society. I have more
confidence that they will succeed than I have in those of you who wallow
in a culture of blaming an imaginary other. Sad to say, that culture of
blaming the other is at the heart of neo-conservatism in this country.
It will eventually prove to be bankrupt, but I suppose it will do quite
a bit of damage before the bankruptcy is fully acknowledged.

> I agree that people do and can delude themselves

But only other people, eh?

> My stance is to consider good will on the part of anybody unless or
> until actual hypocricy becomes evident.

How long does that take? Five minutes? Ten?

> Often ignorance and/or some ideological or emotional blockage accounts
> for the discrepancy between profession and praxis.

Rarely is the blockage ideological. Almost always it is due to
unacknowledged but highly active emotional drives. Ideology is
conscious. Most of what gets us into serious trouble is psychological
factors in ourselves of which we are unconscious. (But then I am a
Jungian, not a Jesuit, so I would say such things, wouldn't I?)

> I only find offensive actual hypocricy and malice.

How do you distinguish hypocrisy (as we spell it here in New Mexico)
from weakness of will (akrasia, as they spell it in Greece)? How to do
discern malice from incompetence? I have never been able to make those
distinctions with anything like accuracy. So I prefer to think simply
that people often fail to do what they set out to do. That is simply a
fact. Overlaying that fact with a value judgement, such as when one
decides without really knowing that failure is hypocrisy or malice,
rarely helps anyone find a remedy. Moralizing as often as not worsens
the problem rather than ameliorating it.

>  That said, I see no grounds for reasonably disagreeing with the
> historical record.  We know what a religious ethos is, and we know
> what "dominant" means.  To state otherwise strikes me as disingenuous.

Very well, I concede the point. The United States is a Protestant nation
in which Roman Catholics are barely tolerated, and women and native
Americans have no right to vote, and the economy is based on slave
labor. Thus it was for most of our history, and thus it ever more should
be, because that is the kind of nation the Founding Fathers wished to
have.

As I have mentioned several times before, I am (slowly) making my way
through Ahlstrom's wonderfully researched and written Religious
History of the American People (by which he means mostly the
religious history of the United States, although he does have quite a
bit to say about Canada and Mexico, but not Venezuela). His discussion
of religion during the 17th century is quite interesting. In those days
90% of the immigrants from Europe were Protestant, and of those the vast
majority were Congregationalists who had a deep suspicion of any kind of
centralized religious authority. Rome, of course, was their paradigm of
institutional evil and the Pope was identified by many as the anti-
Christ. 

To be a considered a Christian by the vast majority of immigrants in
those days one had to belong to a Protestant church, and most Protestant
churches would accept people as members only if they could give a
detailed account (time, place and circumstances) of their being called
by God to a life of holiness AND if they lived in full accordance with
biblical teachings. Adulterers, fornicators, alcohol drinkers and
tobacco smokers were perceived as not living in accordance with
Christian principles, as were cheaters, liars and thieves.

The majority of Protestant sects in those times rejected all creeds,
such as the Nicene creed, and all sacraments except baptism. Many sects,
most famously the Quakers, rejected even baptism. 

If the clock were turned back to the ways of the Europeans who are now,
somewhat inaccurately and romantically, credited with founding the
United States, the country would be living under religious laws not so
different from those in Saudi Arabia and Iran. So when I say that we in
the 21st century need not be bound by all the principles that guided the
Europeans who set the tone of the new nation (quite a number of whom
were my ancestors, so my disagreement with them is really nothing but a
little family squabble), I mean that we have no choice but to use what
Catholics call discernment. We have to pick and choose, and we have no
choice but to interpret old principles in the light of current
realities. We need not, thank God, be stuck with all the attitudes of
those who condemned witches to death and regarded Roman Catholics as
enemies of God.

To my way of thinking, the best thing that has ever happened in the
United States has been the steady and inevitable drift toward secularism
(a movement in which I include Buddhism). The country is still far
behind most of Europe and Canada in this respect, but it is at least
heading in the right direction. There have been, to be sure, setbacks
along the way. We are experiencing one now. If, however, I may borrow a
piece of reasoning from the Bush administration, which sees every
devastating attack on the US military occupation as proof that the enemy
is on the run, I think we can see the desperate bid of the religious
right to control the course of American politics as a sign that they
know they have all but lost the battle against secularism. 

Needless to say, as a Buddhist secular humanist I am quite happy for
every human being (and dog and cat and cockroach) to practice his or her
own religion in the privacy of the home or in privately owned buildings
of worship. What I will always oppose is the intrusion of any religious
doctrine into the public sphere to the exclusion of others. Justice
O'Connor has articulated what seems to me a reasonable principle to
follow: whenever any public manifestation of religion, including the
formulation of new laws based on religious dogma, has the effect of
making some law-abiding citizens (whether they be Muslims, Jews,
Buddhists, homosexuals or communists) feel marginalized, then those
manifestations should be opposed.

> This is a fine rhetorical move on your part.  I happen to agree with
> you that unadulterated consumerism is antithetical to Christianity
> (and I suspect to Buddhism, right?), and I happen to agree with you
> that where our government has abandoned the poor (they are always a
> handy group to bring into an argument) and we intentionally willingly
> acquiesce in this abandonment, that is antithetical to Christianity.

So we agree that the majority of those who think of themselves as
Christians are deluded in this belief and that it would be offensive if
they were to continue making that claim for themselves when their
actions bely their professions.

> But I am not willing to claim that the failings of Christians changes
> the sociological fact that the greater majority of people who here in
> the USA practice a religion (however poorly), ally themselves with
> some form of Christianity.

The key phrase there is "who practice a religion." The majority of
citizens of the USA do not practice any religion at all, unless
consumerism, unjust war and blind patriotism count as religious
practices. In fact, I have argued on numerous occasions that these
things DO, sociologically speaking, amount to the equivalents of
religious practices. I think USAmericans are very good at practicing a
very bad religion, a religion that is not, by any stretch of the
imagination, Christianity, Judaism, Islam or Buddhism.

> Accordingly, the fact that there are Christians who do not live up to
> the demands of the Gospel does not nullify that reality that they are
> Christians; they are simply benighted or unfaithful. 

If one is bad at being a Christian, then one is not in fact a Christian
at all. That principle was invoked repeatedly by the Puritans who
founded this nation. And since by your own advice we should not deviate
from their convictions, you are bound to agree with them.

> Your original statement was simply a blanket statement to the effect
> that whatever bound anybody in any manner in the 18th century "cannot
> possibly be binding in the first decade of the 21st century."  As
> stated, this is false.

Of course it is. So apply some charity of interpretation if you are
interested in anything but winning an argument at all costs. Use your
imagination. Try to figure out what I might have been saying with those
words.

> I would also think that the Supreme Court's justification of this
> principle simply further opens the door to the judiciary subverting
> the legislative branches of government.

I have never seen this happening during my lifetime. What I have seen is
the Executive branch subverting the legislative branch and trying to
manipulate the judiciary. But never has the judiciary subverted the
other two branches, at least not since I have been alive.

> There is also something counter-intuitive to this, especially in light
> of the clearly articulated checks and balances mentioned in the
> Constitution. 

Agreed. The constitution says that only Congress can declare war. And
yet we have an executive branch saying almost daily that we are at war.
In fact, we are not. This is an example of the executive branch
betraying the constitution.

> For me, I was for a long time parrotting the human rights rhetoric
> that humans have a right to life.

My opposition to the death penalty has never been connected with a
discussion of rights. I find almost all talk of "human rights"
unproductive, because no one has ever figured out how to adjudicate
satisfactorily between competing rights. Perhaps reading Alasdair
MacIntyre has helped me clarify my thinking on this sort of thing.

My principal opposition to the death penalty is not on ethical grounds
but on epistemological grounds. It is possible to make mistakes in
finding people guilty. It is impossible to bring someone back to life if
one finds one has mistakenly sentenced him to death.

Given that taking someone's life is an irreversible action, I would have
to have a very strong argument for doing so. It has been shown
repeatedly that the death penalty is not a deterrent to crime, so I
don't buy the utilitarian argument in its favor. There are other ways of
keeping violent people from doing harm than killing them, so I don't
accept the argument based on public safety. I don't believe in vengeance
in any form, so I am not inclined to think that executing a murderer is
a comfort to the loved one's of her victims. So what grounds does that
leave for killing someone?

> You can ask yourself, 'should a serial murderer be kept alive, just
> because he has 'the right to life'?'

If the question is phrased that way, I would reply that nothing has a
right to anything. My claim would be that we never need a reason to
allow someone to live. Where we require a reason is to bring on a
person's death. Just as I have never yet seen any good argument in favor
of war, I have never yet seen any good argument in favor of taking a
human life.

> Now, however, I find his attempts to 'synchronize' Buddhist ethics
> with Western ethics/pragmatism/utilitarianism a bit flawed and
> compulsive. You can wonder what his agenda is to try and observe
> similarities between them.

I see Kalupahana's work part of a larger pattern of post-colonial
intellectuals trying to overcome their shame at having been colonized.
The strategy seems to be to identify what the colonists value most in
their culture and then to show that that very thing is found in a much
more refined form in the colonized culture. The British, for example,
are supposed to value rationality, epistemological accountability and
justice and to decry superstition. So intellectuals from South Asia are
prone to arguing that Buddhism (or Hinduism or Jainism or Confucianism
or Daoism) is much more deeply rational, anti-superstitious, and just-
minded than anything ever found in the West. The Buddha thus comes to be
portrayed as someone who succeeded to do what Descartes, Hume, Kant,
Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Russell, Derrida (or whoever your
favorite European modern or post-modern philosopher may be) failed to
do. Kalupahana fits this pattern very well. Not only is his version of
the Buddha the best philosopher imaginable, but most Western thinkers
(the very one he takes as standards of excellence) end up looking rather
shallow and flat when compared to Kalupahana's fantasies of the Buddha. 
And so Kalupahana joins a rather long queue of Asian intellectuals whose
agenda was to show the superiority of Asian thought. (There was a
similar phenomenon in Africa in a movement called the Negritude
Movement, the aim of which was to show that black people were much
better at living up to the lofty aspirations of white people than white
people ever were.) 

> This issue is very real though. I have run into many people who just 
> don't feel comfortable in the Asian Buddhist surroundings.

Have you run across Westerners who feel quite comfortable in Asian
Buddhist settings but feel queasy around Westerners who try to act like
Asians by dressing in Asian clothes, eating with East Asian utensils,
going by Sanskrit or Japanese names they can't pronounce correctly und
so weiter? If not, let me introduce myself. I think we could become
friends.

> Not knowing who Pinker is, I checked with amazon and found this blurb for 
> his recent book, _The Blank Slate : The Denial of Human Nature and Modern 
> Intellectual Life_, that might help to clarify what he's up to:

Pinker was born in Montreal in 1954 and was trained in psychology at
McGill University. He is now at MIT, where he has done some excellent
work in cognitive psychology. He is particularly interested in the
computational view of the mind. His book How the mind works
won awards. He is one of the most readable and entertaining science
writers on the scene. As an added bonus, he likes to take on cherished
dogmas of the age and criticizes them intelligently.

If you do a Google search on him you'll find several hundred references
to people howling about his claim that a human foetus is not yet complex
enough to support enough consciousness to speak of. This produced a
spate of editorials in the NY Times decrying the fact that a person who
advocates infanticide can get tenure at a major university, and
criticizing the NY Times for allowing a child murderer to express his
views in public. 

Let me know when the times we are living in are scary enough for you.

> Pinker is now at Harvard. I happened to notice his statement 
> of support for their president in the recent squabble and 
> subsequent (non-binding) faculty vote of no-confidence.

That would be consistent with his stance in The Blank
Slate in which he says that saying that ANYTHING may be
genetically inherited rather than culturally conditioned will bring on
the academic Thought Police. He cites ample evidence that numerous
people across the country have almost been drummed out of the corps for
even suggesting as one of several hypotheses that certain abilities (or
lacks thereof) might have genetics as a factor. It has become, he
claims, a taboo hypothesis.

> Language lovers at M.I.T. must have been enthralled when Pinker began
> taking on Chomsky!

One of my colleagues, trained in linguistics at MIT, frequently says
that linguistics has stopped being a science and has become a dogmatic
personality cult built around Chomsky. This colleague has used Pinker's
book in his introductory linguistics course, much to the horror of his
colleagues, all of whom are True Believers in whatever Chomsky has said
in his most recent publication.

> I say this having read Williams excellent book "Buddhist
> Thought", which was published in the midst of his recent
> conversion away from Buddhism. The tone of that book
> is extremely problematic in places and he makes very strange
> choices of words - like insisting on calling the Buddha and
> by extension all Indian ascetics "dropouts". 

What other word would you use for people who abandon their biological
families and leave behind all earthly ties? People who renounce the
world do drop out of mainstream society. What is wrong, then, with
designating them with a term that accurately describes what they
advocated doing and did?

> Of course one can choose to use a term like "dropout" if one wishes -
> but it is a choice that reveals something about the mindset of the
> author. 

Right. What this choice of words reveals about Williams is that he is
trying to avoid pedantic language and is trying to speak in terms people
readily understand. You see, using an exotic word like "bhikkhu"
disguises the fact that the word means "beggar." When one is speaking
about a movement of people who took pride in abandoning the ways of
polite society and who deliberately chose to call themselves by words
that in their society had very negative connotations, a good way to
capture the dynamic equivalence of the terms they called themselves is
to use words that conjure up similar images in the minds of modern
readers. Steve Collins used to refer to Buddhist bhikkhus as tramps and
bums, arguing that these English terms come much closer than terms like
"monk" at capturing what the word "bhikkhu" meant to speakers of Indic
languages at the time of the Buddha.

> When reading a book about the drunken sexual daliances of
> a historically important figure in Buddhism, I think it is
> only fair to ask what the point is supposed to be.

That human beings are, after all, human beings? That nobody has a
monopoly on virtue? That many Western Buddhists are hopelessly naive
about Buddhism and imagine that Asian Buddhists somehow managed to avoid
debauchery, scandals, pettiness, political intrigues, hypocrisy and akrasia?

> This is even more true when one reads that Williams is
> publicly saying that the current military occupation of Tibet
> by China is, at least in part, a result of the behavior of the
> sixth Dalai Lama.

All one has to do is read a little bit of what the Chinese routinely say
about Tibetan history to know that he is right. The Chinese do not have
to look very far to find some splendid examples of Tibetan leaders
exercising brutality against the Tibetan people. You can bet that if the
traditional Tibetan government were still in place (and if Tibet had
oil), a lot of Americans, including several in the White House, would be
screaming for regime change and establishing democracy in this benighted
part of the world. Any balanced recounting of Tibetan history will show
that the Tibetans were not much different from the other people in
Central Asia. Actually, it's quite a fascinating history. I recommend
starting with the work of Gavin Hambly, who edited a wonderful
collection of pieces on the history of Tibet, Mongolia, Uzbekistan and
all manner of peoples who at one time were part of the Soviet Union and
now have formed some of the most bloody and repressive regimes on the
face of the earth (some of whom the USA have made into trusted allies in
the farce they call The War on Terror).

On the grounds that Paul Williams is an excellent scholar, a very fine
human being, a deep thinker, and a man who is independent enough in his
thinking not to spew anyone's party line (whether the Dalai Lama's or
the Pope's), I recommend his work without any reservations at all. (Of
course, you should bear in mind that I am allegedly a former Communist,
a one-time Quaker, a quasi-Unitarian, a dharmachari in the notorious
Western Buddhist Order, a mere philosopher, and the husband of a yogini
who admires both Swami Vivekananda and a Jesuit Zen teacher, and
therefore I have no credibility whatsoever in Buddhist circles.)

> there are very few whose ability to encourage niceness in others
> equals or matches the the Dark Forces that discourage niceness.

This has always been so, I think. It was certainly the case at the time
of the Buddha. He had a remarkably small effect on the events of his
day. He managed to gather 1250 disciples over the course of 45 years of
teaching. (It is not uncommon these days for a fair-to-middling
evangelists to gather flocks of 15,000 or more in five years.) Half of
the Buddha's disciples defected at one point. One of his most
influential disciples was beaten to death by thugs from another outfit.
Another trusted disciple tried to kill him. His community was rocked
with scandals and political failures. All said, I'm not sure the Buddha
was not a counterexample to the dictum about nice guys finishing last.

> For my money "simply being a nice guy" is woefully inadequate in such
> a situation - it is necessary to find a way to tip the balance towards
> more overall niceness. 

Necessary, yes. But possible? I have yet to see any evidence anywhere
suggesting that there is anything rational about hope for the human
race. Thank God we're only a very minor sideshow in the overall scheme
of things and won't take much of anything important with us when we go
out with either a bang or a whimper.

> I am a little more able to experience compassion than niceness, any
> ideas about why it is more difficult to be nice than to be
> compasionated? or do you think those are same aspects of the same?
 
I think they are different aspects of the same thing. Being a hopeless
addict of etymology, I can't resist pointing out that the word "nice" is
derived, through medieval French, from the Latin "nescius", which means
ignorant. The word "nice" used to mean simple-minded, foolish,
unsophisticated, ignorant. A simpleton often makes pleasant company,
because one can easily take advantage of such a person. We usually think
of people as nice when they don't get in our way very much. People who
really help us in an active way, by pointing our our own foolishness
(niceness?), usually don't seem very nice to us.

> Was the Mahayana taught by the Buddha, or was it invented after his 
> death?

A huge furor was created in Japan in the mid-19th century when a
celebrated scholar claimed that Mahayana sutras were composed many
centuries after the Buddha's death. This scholar, as I recall, felt
compelled to resign from his academic post for creating such a stir.
Apparently textual and historical criticism of Buddhist texts was no
better received in Japan than textual and historical criticism of
biblical texts was received in Europe. It was perceived by many as a
hostile attack on believers by people who had gone over to the dark side.

Although making such a claim would not create as big a panic today as it
did in the mid-1800s, one can still sense a certain amount of tension
between some historians and some Buddhists. 

>  The Dalai Lama asserts in one of his books that it was in fact 
> taught by the Buddha, but he does not go into any more detail than that. 

That is the official position of traditional Mahayana teachers.

> Other books I have looked at say the Mahayana emerged 500 or so years 
> after the Buddha's death.

That is what most textual historians (including Mahayana Buddhist
scholars in both Asia and the West) would say.

Perhaps your question merits a counter-question: what difference does it
make to you personally what the answer to your question turns out to be?

>> That is the official position of traditional Mahayana teachers.
>>
> Do they have this position because they disagree with the scholars on 
> the dates that the various writings were created? Or do they have this 
> position because they find hints of Mahayana teachings in the original 
> Pali scriptures?

Hardly any traditional Mahayana teachers have any knowledge of the Pali
canon, since it was not translated into Chinese or Tibetan. Parts of the
Sanskrit (or perhaps some vernacular Indian language) canons that were
approximate counterparts of the Pali canon were translated into Chinese
and Tibetan, but they tend to be ignored, mostly because of a strong
prejudice against them. (Just last weekend I heard a veteran Zen
practitioner say "Why would anyone study inferior teachings when we have
access to superior Mahayana teachings?") So I don't think the answer is
that traditional Mahayana teachers find hints of Mahayana teachings in
any of the śr�vakay�na canons. Rather, I think the traditional Mahayana
teachers subscribe to the view that the Mahayana teachings were spoken
by the Buddha and then transmitted "underground" for several centuries
until people were ready for them.

> Of course, whether you accept or reject a teaching should be based on 
> it's content, not on it's author. 

Yes, and the content of any teaching should be accepted when it turns
out to be useful to accept it. Only you can decide how useful a 
teaching is to you.

> However, in cases where faith is required to follow a teaching until
> you have the neccessary understanding of it, then it is easier if you
> already have respect for the author's other works.

The problem I see in this way of looking at things is that if you don't
have the necessary understanding of a teaching, there is no way you can
follow it anyway. Faith will not come to your aid, because faith itself
is generated by seeing that a teaching is working, and a teaching works
only after you understand it. So faith is the end point, not the
starting point. The whole issue of who the author of a teaching is is a
distraction. My advice would be not to worry about that, unless you are
an historian and want to speculate on how things got to be as they are.

> I thought that was proof, not faith.

What I am describing is what it Buddhism is called śraddh�, which some
people translate as faith. In a sense, it is a bit like faith, as when
we say "I have faith in your ability to get a good grade in calculus."
Obviously, one doesn't have blind faith in someone to do a good job.
Rather, one has reason to believe, based on past experience, that the
person will do a good job. That is exactly what śraddh� is. One has
confidence, based on one's past experiences, that certain practices will
lead to good results. Since life is uncertain, one can never be
absolutely sure that what has worked before will work again, but at
least one has good reason to place one's bets on continuing to do what
has worked well before. That is śraddh�. It is quite different from the
theological virtue of faith as it is defined in mainstream Christianity,
which sees faith as a grace that no one can cultivate without divine
aid. As I understand it, śraddh� is a middle path between the extremes
of Christian faith and mathematical proof. It is more like what Stephen
Toulmin calls a justified warrant to believe, rather like the confidence
a jury has in evidence presented in a court trial.

> Someone may be selfish and unhappy. However it might not be clear to 
> them that the cause of their unhappiness is selfishness. In this case 
> they may follow the teaching of altruism in blind faith and once they 
> achieve happiness they have proof that the cause of the unhappiness was 
> selfishness.

I don't think one ever has proof. Rather, as I said above, one has
reason to continue doing what turns out to work. What drives us to try a
new strategy is more akin to desperation guided by blind luck than to
blind faith.

> If someone reads a teaching about aspiring to become a Bodhisattva and
> decides this is a good course of action, they need to have faith that
> what is contained in the teaching is actually possible.

Again, I would disagree with you on that. First, I don't think it's at
all necessary to believe that something is possible in order to strive
in the direction of it. In Buddhism you need not have any idea where you
are going; it is sufficient to know what you want to get away from. If
you are not happy being selfish, you move away from selfishness. You can
do this even if you have no idea whether it's possible to become
perfectly altruistic. Bodhicitta is just moving in the direction of
altruism. Could you be more altruistic than you now are? If so, you 
need know nothing else. 

Have you found that by cultivating kindness through contemplative
exercises you can move away from selfishness, even if only for a while?
If so, then you have all the faith you need to keep doing those
exercises. Knowing who invented the exercises will not help you follow
them any more than knowing who wrote the software you are using to read
this e-mail message will help you send an intelligent reply.

Did the historical Buddha teach anything about bodhicitta? Damned if I
know. Is bodhicitta worth cultivating? As Krishnamurti was fond of
saying to such questions, "Find out."

> Here in Toronto a journalist once asked DL "do you really believe that you
> are the reincarnated Avelokiteshvara, God(dess) of Compassion?"  DL replied
> "some days I think I am, and some days I think I'm not" with his well loved
> giggle.

About ten years ago I saw a similar interview on CBC. At that time, when
asked the same question, HHDL just laughed and said nothing at all. He
just looked at the reporter and waited patiently for the next question.
I can't imagine a better answer to such a question.

Once when HHDL was in Montreal at a political workshop, he said he
thought the whole institution of the Dalai Lama should be scrapped,
because it is undemocratic and no longer useful. The philosopher Charles
Taylor was at this meeting, and he said "Don't be too quick to get rid
of a system that produces leaders of your calibre." That exchange got
right to the heart of an ambivalence many of us have about democracy. I
just didn't know where I stood on the issue. I suppose I agree most with
Aristotle's observation that democracy is the worst of the good forms of
government and the best of the bad forms of government. Because
democracy is so cumbersome, it is bad because it slows down a benevolent
dictator (as the current Dalai Lama could be if he had a country to
govern and if he chose to be a dictator, neither of which is the case),
but it is good because it retards a tyrant (although not as much as some
of us would like). I don't know what Aristotle would think about
democracies, such as the one in the USA, that have become a farce
because of the appallingly misinformed and undereducated citizenry.

> The last I heard, there had already been four turnings by those who like
> to count such things. So Queen's would make a fifth, provided that
> Buddhist arithmetic admits that four plus one makes five. 

Not so fast, Dr. Hayes. The four turnings of the wheel is a Mahayana
myth according to which the first turning was about elementary matters
such as how to attain nirvana and how to count to four (or, for advanced
students, eight), the second turning was about emptiness and
bodhisattvas, the third was about awareness only and the fourth was
about tathagata-garbha. 

Now, Chris Queen's article on the so-called "fifth turning of the wheel"
is mostly about Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. Ambedkar repudiated Mahayana in
no uncertain terms, portraying it as the insidious intrusion of Hindu
superstitions into the Buddha-dhamma. Hindu superstition, claimed
Ambedkar, was responsible for enfeebling the Indian people, turning them
into morally confused weaklings and physical cowards who were subject to
constant conquest by outsiders (Huns, Arabs, Persians, Turks and
Britons). Ambedkar would regard the second, third and fourth phases of
Buddhism not as turnings of the wheel but as jamming a stick into the
spokes and bringing the wheel to an abrupt stop. To honour Ambedkar,
then, one should not use the metaphor of the fifth turning of the wheel
to refer to his brand of engaged Buddhism, but as an attempt to restart
the first (and only true) turning of the wheel.

As Buddhist scholastics in India never tired of pointing out, metaphors
matter. As George Lakoff has written, we live by them. We also die by
them. And (says Lakoff) we also let ourselves be seduced into electing
dangerous and tyrannical governments by them. I think he may exaggerate,
but I am too bushed right now to say why.

> My own conclusion on that was that interest in Buddhism is directly 
> proportional to the level of education (relative to a given society) and 
> the leisure to investigate cultural alternatives.

Thomas Tweed has made a similar observation about Buddhism in America.
In the 19th century only the most wealthy could learn about Buddhism,
since books and travel were both expensive, and one could not learn much
about Buddhism without buying prohibitively expensive academic books or
traveling to Asia. 

Moreover, in the 1850s and later, it was considered alien and somehow
un-American to take an interest in Buddhism; this was the time of the
"nativist" movement in American religion, when any religious traditions
that were associated with exotic places like Rome and Asia were regarded
with deep suspicion. (Of course religions associated with native
American peoples were also somehow deemed un-American, but that's
another whole story.) So when Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State took
a fancy in Buddhism, he kept it secret from everyone but his most
intimate friends. Even many members in his family did not know that he
secretly considered himself a Buddhist. Tweed's account of all this is
quite fascinating.

> pace Richard Hayes, the *dharma* may be easy to understand, but
> *Buddhism* is rich and complicated, and it takes a certain level of
> intercultural nous to get a grip on it (only to have that grip
> loosened by Buddhism itself, of course).

No pace needed on that. It states my position exactly. There is
hardly anything in the teachings of the Buddha that puts a strain on the
intellect, but once intellectuals got their talons into the Dharma, it
became dead meat. Some of the writings of Buddhist intellectuals became
so abstruse that hardly anyone could make heads of tails of them. And
then the measure of how well someone "understood" Dharma was not how
kind they were, but how well they could explain the subtle differences
between Devendrabuddhi and Manorathanandin, or between mKhas-grub and
rGyal-msthan, or between Xianzang and Fazang.

> This implies that Buddhism in its initial stage of transference from one 
> culture to another will inevitably have an elitist air about it.

Its elitism is inevitable only if what is transmitted is the works of
scholastics. If someone insists that the epitome of Dharma is Fazang or
Tsong ha pa or Dogen, then only highly specialized scholars will be
qualified to study Dharma. But it needn't be that way, even if it 
almost always is that way.

> It is taught if you take a vow and break, it is better than not having 
> taken it at all, in the sense that samsara will have an end for you.

The position stated here makes quite a lot of sense on both the
psychological and the social level. On the psychological level, as I
have already said, failure to adhere to a vow brings with it a heavier
burden of failure. Smoking a cigarette is always injurious to one's
health, but smoking a cigarette on the afternoon of January 1, just a
few hours after one has made a resolve not to smoke, is not only
unhealthy but feels like a defeat. Self-esteem takes a dive. The payload
of dukkha is rich indeed.

Vows, by their nature, tend to be public acts. Something like a monastic
vow, as it is explained by Vasubandhu, is a kind of promise to the
public to behave in an exemplary manner. When on takes a vow, then one
is seen, whether one likes it or not, as a person whose behavior is to
be emulated. So if one behaves contrary to one's vows, then one is
setting a lower standard for the public and is thereby letting them
down. To use the smoking example, I would claim that it is more serious
for a teacher or a monk to smoke cigarettes than for someone whose job
description is not to be a role model for the rest of society. (Several
years ago, I recall reading an article written by a fellow who actually
gave up Buddhism and quit meditating when he discovered that his
Buddhist meditation teacher was a smoker. That is a bit of an extreme
reaction, sort of like refusing to take medicine when one finds out the
pharmacist doesn't meet one's expectations, but it is not an unusual
reaction. One could argue, if one believes that giving up meditation and
being driven from Buddhism is not ideal, that the meditation teacher's
smoking harmed not only the teacher but the student.)

Smoking is not the best example, of course, because it does not involve
monastic vows. The potential harm involved in breaking monastic vows is
considerably more serious. When a monk, who is regarded as a paradigm of
virtue, embezzles money or tells lies, he is sending a message to people
that embezzling money or telling lies is somehow compatible with being
virtuous. He is impairing the glue that holds society together. The
consequences for everyone are much more severe when a person who is
expected to be exemplary misbehaves than when, say, a child or an
ordinary person misbehaves. This is the thinking behind the Confucian
principle of the rectification of names, on which so much of East Asian
reflection on good conduct is based, and I think it is also the thinking
(though stated in different language) behind Indian and Tibetan views of
the karma of vows.

> The tantric and Hinayana traditions emphasize the retribution
> aspect of karma far too much for my tastes as well as far too much to be a
> useful teaching in today's world.

I am completely ignorant of tantra, so I can say nothing about it. There
is no school of Buddhism that calls itself Hinayana, so I am not sure
exactly to what you are referring. A straw man, I guess. All I know is
that the Buddhist texts with which I am familiar do not talk about
retribution at all. They talk about the probable consequences of
attitudes and actions. And this way of talking, it seems to me, is ideal
for today's world. 

Today's world is being ripped to pieces by people who pass judgement on
the external conduct of others and who insist on passing laws that would
oblige all people to act in accordance with the values of only a few
people who fancy that they are in a unique position to know the mind of
God. Buddhist karma theory, in sharp contrast to that, is an invitation
to turn inward to study the psychological effects of thinking-and-doing
on one's own state of happiness and well-being. Being inward-looking,
Budhdist karma theory has very little potential (perhaps none at all) to
be used as a rigid standard by which to disparage and marginalize
others. This can be said of all Buddhist discussions of karma that I
have ever seen, and that includes a pretty substantial amount of
literature of Mahayana as well as of Sravakayana. As I said before, I
must defer all discussion of tantrism to those who know something about it. 

> I personally am much more attracted to the salvific doctrine of the
> Mahayana schools.

Then it is good that the Mahayana is there for you. It is equally
fortunate that what you stupidly and mistakenly call "hinayana" is there
for those who prefer it. There is medicine in the cabinet for every
ailment. Take what heals your disease and leave the rest for those who
may have other diseases.

> Besides, it is rather indulgent to claim that we can read fourth or 
> fifth century Buddhist texts as they were read by those for whom 
> these texts were written: fourth and fifth century Buddhists.

It could be said to be indulgent to try to run 100 meters in zero
seconds, but if you think about it, that's what everyone who runs a race
is trying to do. Everyone fails, of course, but whoever comes closest to
the impossible goal is the winner of the race. 

Similarly, it goes without saying that it is impossible to read a text
exactly as it was understood by its author. This is, nevertheless, the
idea of a translator. Of course a translator fails, but that does not
mean that no one should try his or her best to come as close humanly
possible to understand a text as its author meant it to be understood.
It takes, as you well know, a lot of very difficult work, and the
rewards of doing a good job are mostly intangible. The main reward is
probably the enjoyment of doing something challenging. 

Having said that, I think we can say that some translations are
objectively better than others, demonstrably more accurate and palpably
less imperfect. No one ever meets the ideal of a translation, which is
to recreate exactly the meaning of the original author, but some
scholars fails more dramatically than others. The goal of any exegete is
to fail somewhat less dramatically than others have done.

Here it might be useful to be reminded of the distinction between
exegesis and hermeneutics. The former is the study of what documents
meant at the time they were written, the later is the discussion of what
those documents can mean now. If one is striving to be historically
accurate--if one is doing exegesis--then it is misleading to read into
old texts what we would now like them to mean. 

If one is doing exegesis of Buddhist texts, then it is best to keep out
categories that were alien to them at the time they were written. Once
one has done that, one can then do hermeneutics, but it's impossible to
do good hermeneutics until one has first done a respectable job of
exegesis.

> > Ethics are supererogatory. 
> > 
> is this statement true of all ethics or only of Buddhism?

I suppose this depends entirely on one's view of ethics. I meant this
statement to apply to Buddhism, which does have, I think, a somewhat
different view of ethics than some other systems of thought and
practice, and especially has a different view from those systems that
see precepts as a duty or obligation on people imposed on them from the
outside. 

In Buddhism almost all discussion of behavior puts reflection on how one
acts in the context of reducing pain. No one has any obligation or duty
to reduce pain. But if one does wish to reduce pain, then Buddhists have
some advice on how one might go about doing that. So discussions of
behavior are framed in language like "If you wish to avoid pain for
yourself and others, then avoid doing X." This is importantly different
from saying (and then pretending it was actually God who said it) "Thou
shalt not do X." 

> Does this mean there are no obligations at all or that they are
> conditional given one's ends?

As I understand the term, obligation refers to a binding relationship
one has with others. One can, of course, enter into obligations
voluntarily, through contracts, making promises and the like. In
Buddhism one can take vows, such as those of a bhikkhu, and these oblige
one to act in certain ways so long as one is receiving the benefits of a
mendicant. It seems to be a kind of social contract. In this respect, it
is importantly different from other undertakings, which do not take the
form of contracts with anyone else at all. If I undertake to, say, do
aerobics training for my health, I am under no obligation of any kind to
anyone. Buddhist precepts are just like that; they are voluntary
undertakings done for the purpose of being well and feeling well.

> Perhaps more analogous to virtue ethics than modern European
> prescriptive systems? 

One can see Buddhist discussions of habit as having elements in common
with eudaemonianism. One chooses a goal (telos) and acts in ways that
enable one to realize it.

> As far as vows are concerned--if vows involve intentions, then don't
> they involve "ethics" in the sense of prescriptions (even if
> conditional)? Doesn't karma involve some kind of responsibility for
> one's actions?

The way Buddhist texts discuss karma, there is no talk of anything like
responsibility. If someone says "If you step off the roof of a ten-
storey building, you will fall to your death," one is making an
observation about how things tend to go in the physical world. If
someone says "If you deliberately harm others, you yourself will
probably feel pain," one is making an observation about how things tend
to go in the psychological realm of subjective experience. In neither of
these claims--the one about gravity and the one about intentions--is
there any discussion of responsibility. If you say "You have a
responsibility or an obligation not to step off the roofs of tall
buildings," then you are saying much more than if you simply say that
stepping off the roof of a tall building will probably hurt or kill you.
This something more that is said in statements about obligation and
responsibility is not said by most Buddhists texts of which I am aware.

> Any comments would be appreciated.

That, it seems to me, is a descriptive statement about your personal
relationship with comments, and not a statement about obligation or
responsibility. Now if you could see most Buddhist discussions about the
psychological results of action in the same way, you would see clearly
what the Buddhist discussion of karma is all about.

> Its all just karma.

You've got it. Pretty well all Buddhist "ethical" theory (the jury is
still out on whether Buddhism has any ethical theory at all in the sense
that Europeans have thought about ethics) is based on a study of how
habits are formed and what the quality of life is like for people who
have developed certain habits. That is what karma is all about.

> The vow to do one's utmost for the other obligates all beings whether
> they know it or not. 

If you'll read the karma chapter of the Abhidharmakosha carefully, I
think you'll find that the effects of bad karma are more serious when
one has taken vows. The reason for this is that vows are seen as a way
to cultivate habits that conduce to peace of mind. If one fails to
follow a vow that one has voluntarily chosen to follow, then the chances
of having the discipline to cultivate wholesome habits are seriously
diminished, and one's sense of failure is higher. Since a sense of
failure is one of the many forms that dukkha takes, to fail to follow a
voluntary vow results in dukkha. That is karma-vipaaka. Thinking about
it in ethical terms could be somewhat wrong-headed, for it is imposing a
category onto Buddhism that is alien to it. 

> The boddhisattva is the one who fully assumes this obligation in her
> vow. 

The bodhisattva takes a vow. There is no obligation involved anywhere.

> There are limits to e-dialogue.

Like all things, it is finite. And like all things one can use it well
if one wills so to do.

> Vigilance in the ferreting out of wrong views and wrong speech.

I think you need to reread the Simile Of The Snake, the sutta in the
Majjhima-nikaaya in which the Buddha warns that taking the dhamma in the
wrong way is like picking up a snake by the wrong end. What is the wrong
way to pick up a snake? The Buddha explains that when we pick up the
dhamma in order to win debates, score points, point out the weaknesses
of others and so forth, then we are taking up the dhamma in a way that
only does us harm. Vigilance is ferreting out one's own wrong views and
wrong speech is good practice. Imagining maliciousness in others is not
a particularly good practice. In this matter, I would invite you to
reflect on whether your practice has been exemplary. From where I sit,
it appears to stink. But only you can decide that for yourself.

> My god Richard have you ever actually picked up a Mahayana canonical text
> at all.

First of all, it's sufficient to call me Richard. Even though I am the
moderator, there is no need to address me as your god.

Second, I stand a little puzzled. Frankly, I didn't know the Mahayana
was uptight enough to have a canon. I thought only dualists (boo, hiss)
had fences between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. 

> Might we take a moment to consider the vast difference between an author's 
> intention and the meaning of his or her words

I can't imagine that any saying has any meaning at all aside from what
its author intended.

> I thought that the meaning you intended by your words and the meanings 
> taken by the readers of your words were at some remove from each 
> other.  This happens.  It's in the nature of reading.  Whatever the words 
> of an author are intended to mean, they often mean something else to his 
> readers.

Yes, this sort of thing does happen. The hazard of misinterpreting an
author's intentions increases with the temporal distance between author
and reader. I recall reading in Leibniz once that it is almost
impossible to know when authors from a different time and culture are
joking and when they are being serious, when they are saying things they
intend to be taken literally and when they are waxing poetic and
allegorical. And this difficulty, he observed, often results in a
tendency to take old texts literally, perhaps much more literally than
their authors intended them to be taken. But the point is, we don't know
for sure how a deceased author intended his words to be taken, and
therefore hermeneutics is always "interesting" (by which, of course, I
mean imprecise and therefore risky).

When one has the luxury of being able to communicate with an author and
ask what the intention was behind certain words, then hermeneutics is
not quite so risky. One can just ask for clarification, and usually it
helps. The only time it may not help is when the inquisitor is following
what is often called the hermeneutics of suspicion, which is based on
the presupposition that the author has a hidden, and usually pernicious,
agenda that he or she is deeply unwilling to have come to light. The
hermeneutics of suspicion, like most other manifestations of suspicion,
pretty much makes communication impossible, since no statement is taken
at face value, unless of course it reflects very badly on its speaker.

> I would like to mention the principle of charity, alongside your mention of 
> a hermeneutics of suspicion.

The textbook I have been using to teach a course called "Reasoning and
critical thinking" has a wonderful section on the importance of the
principle of charity. (The text is John Hughes, Critical Thinking.) The
hermeneutics of suspicion, it seems to me, is a dramatic failure of the
principle of charity; it seems, in fact, to be almost the opposite. The
principle of charity begins with the assumption that the person whose
words one is interpreting is being honest, benevolent, and basically
sensible until it can be established conclusively that he or she was
being deliberately deceptive, malevolent or seriously mistaken.
Occasionally I have encountered people who find this principle of
charity unconscionably naive. Personally, I find it no more naive than
the principle that a person should be assumed innocent until proved
guilty.

Incidentally, when I taught from Hughes last semester the US political
campaigns were in full swing. Students were deeply impressed by the
almost total absence of the principle of charity in ANY of the political
campaigning that was in full public view. It is a sad feature of the way
that democracy (or at least the pseudo-democracy that now prevails) has
evolved that one sees in practice so few examples of human nobility. It
seems that Swami Vivekananda was right when he said that the 20th
century would be the age of the Shudra.

> I think this principle (or something like it) must be operative in all
> verbal interactions or there will be no conversation. 

I fully agree. It has also been my experience that not everyone is really
very interested in conversation. They seem more interested in
conversion. Still, I think the better assumption to make is that one's
interlocutor is interested in discussion rather than disputation. And,
as you suggest from your own experience, anyone engaged in teaching
really must begin with the assumption that discussion is the top item on
everyone's agenda. Not to make such an assumption is certainly bad
pedagogy and bad manners. One could even make a case, I think, for the
position that not beginning withe the principle of charity is bad
morals.

> And might not a principle of charity remind us of compassion?

It does seem that something like the principle of charity is at the
heart of right speech and also at the heart of mettaa, of which
compassion is one of the modes. Indeed, I think that being mindful of
the principle of charity in discussion could be the basis of a
substantial and fruitful Buddhist practice.

> So, the questions: what exactly in the suttas (not the commentaries) is 
> bodhi, and how does it differ, if at all, from that of the arahant?

As far as I am aware, there is no difference at all. Buddhas and
arahants both have exactly the same set of bojjhangas. The only
difference, I think, is that an arahant had the help of the teachings of
a buddha in acquiring the bojjhangas, and a pacceka-buddha and 
anuttara-sammaa-sambuddha have no such help.

> "Stereotypes?" You may be able to dazzle your undergrads with these sorts of
> rhetorical tricks; to the rest of us they are transparent.

Obviously not. Rather, they are an opaque stream on which you can
project your fantasies. But no harm done.

> Immigrants are the a favorite scapegoat of the Right these days,

It's not quite that simple. Many liberals like Lou Dobbs rail against
our lax enforcement of immigration laws and actually oppose President
Bush's efforts to open up immigration. The Democratic platform (for
those of you who forgot that they also ran in the 2004 elections) had a
carefully worded paragraph criticizing the Republican policy of opening
up immigration. Their claim was that the principal motivation of the
Republicans was to bring in cheap labor. The Democrat's position was to
admit no new immigrants unless they be accepted as fully equal in every
respect to all other Americans; in other words, they stood strongly
against creating a new underclass of underpaid workers without health
benefits and all the benefits that normally go to American workers.

> It seems to me that Buddhism has a clear and definite definition of 
> what enlightenment that is neither absurd or incoherent and I don't see 
> why we should abandon it in favor of Richard's definition as "whatever 
> Buddhists happen to approve of."

Actually, the only definition of enlightenment I have ever seen is "the
absence of delusion." And delusion is defined as thinking that what is
ugly is beautiful, what is impermanent is permanent, what is impure is
pure and what is not self is self. 

Beauty and ugliness are purely subjective and really do amount to
nothing but what one approves of. 

The same is true of purity and impurity. It is impossible to be in error
about a subjective evaluation. 

That leaves the impermanent and not self. Very few people I have ever
know are mistaken about those things. 

This leads me to conclude that hardly anybody is deluded. Therefore,
everyone is enlightened. And if that's the case, the word is pretty near
meaningless, since it excludes nothing. And therefore it is a good
candidate for being abandoned.

Face it, Bernie, the concept of delusion is dogma-driven. A person who
is deluded according to Buddhist lights is someone who does not accept
Buddhist dogmas. A person who is deluded by Catholic lights is someone
who does not accept Catholic dogmas.

> Even if false, why abandon what's been consistently asserted
> throughout the history of Buddhism? 

Would you apply that principle to EVERY doctrine that has been asserted
throughout history? Would you say "Even if it's false, why abandon the
theory of the four elements" and "Even though it's false, why abandon
the view that the earth rests on the back of a turtle," or "Even though
it's false, why abandon the doctrine that God created the world in 
seven days"?

> And I can hear a cough or a sneeze (and even a word involuntarily spoken
> should there be such)--though I'd be reluctant to call these "actions," just
> because I find it difficult to superimpose on these the "mental constructs"
> which define for me what it means for an observable behavior to actually be
> an action. 

Sanskrit and Pali distinguish between kriyaa and karman. The former is
any action, such as an involuntary one or even the action of an
inanimate object, such as a rock falling down a hill. The latter is for
deliberate actions. In Buddhism it is for deliberate actions performed
by an agent whose motive is some kind of personal benefit. So arhants do
not do karma; they do, however, do kriyaa.

I take it that no one but the agent of an action can know whether or not
the action is a karman. So if I see somone cough, I can observe the
action. But if I use that observation as an inference of the agent's
mental state, as when I say "You coughed on purpose," then I am
superimposing a construct onto the observation.

> PS:  If we can't tell whether actions are kriyaa or karman, how can we 
> claim that actions could be enlightened?

I don't think actions are enlightened in themselves. I think people deem
actions as being enlightened. Enlightenment, in other words, is an
attribute superimposed upon actions by people who observe them. And when
they deem an action to be enlightened, I guess what they are deeming is
that the agent of the action did the action without any thought of
personal gain.

Actually, I find the whole idea of enlightenment very confused. It is an
idea that is foreign to Buddhism, I think. What is NOT confused is the
concept of nirvana. That is very straightforward. When the shift was
made from seeking nirvana to seeking enlightenment, Buddhism took a
dreadful turn for the worse. You can blame this bad turn on the Lotus
Sutra, which may be the only text ever written that I would not stop
someone from throwing onto a fire. 

> If you want to stick close to the Sanskrit, the appropriate
> translation would be something like "awakening" for the Sanskrit
> "bodhi" (the term is a noun) and one who is (or has) "awakened" for
> the Sanskrit "buddha" (it's a bhuute k.rdanta, past passive
> participle).

Buddhist scholastics interpreted "buddha" in two ways. In one sense, it
means "one who has awakened" (hence kartari rather than karma.ni), and
in a second sense it means "one who learned and hence knows" (also
kartari). 

In the first sense, the metaphor is that of someone who has come out of
a stupor or intoxicated state. So the English translation that best
captures this sense is perhaps "The Sober One" or, or if we want to
follow the jargon of modern substance abuse programs, "He who is in
recovery."

In the second sense, it has the sense of being wise. So a buddha is a
wise person or a sage.

> Should we simply accept the superficial blather that tries
> to put the words "Buddhism" and "peace" next to each other without
> ever bothering to explain what the supposed connection is? 

Isn't that what religion is all about, the almost total absence of any 
kind of critical thinking? And isn't Buddhism a religion? Should we be 
surprised to find that Buddhists are about as uncritical as members of 
other religious communities?

> Shouldn't Buddha-l demand to know where Buddhists have been hiding their
> supposed insights into a more peaceful world for the last 2500 years,
> and why these insights have never actually been put into practice in
> societies where Buddhism is a major influence?

Is Buddhism an major influence anywhere? Has it ever been? Or has the 
name of Buddhism, like the names of most other religions, been hijacked 
by power-hungry charlatans eager to line their own pockets while 
enslaving the poor? 

> But modern zennies don't talk about the 'middle way', they talk about
> 'non-dualism'. 

Non-dualism is dependent on dualism in that it is a rejection of
dualism. But as you know well, there are many kinds of dualism. There is
mind-body dualism (which most Buddhists accept), good-evil dualism 
(such as Manichaeism), the sort of dualism that makes one draw distinctions
between members of one's own tribe and outsiders, and and on. Indeed,
anyone who makes a false dichotomy of any kind will probably have a 
non-dualist come along to point out the fallacy involved. 

It seems to me some that sophomores in philosophy, and perhaps some
zennists, have a tendency to absolutize non-dualism. Rather than being
wary of a particular kind of dualism (which takes thinking), they take a
course (which requires no thinking at all) of rejecting ALL dichotomies,
no matter what they may be. Part of rejecting all dichotomies, of
course, is to reject two-valued logic. And, since all words have meaning
only insofar as they partition the conceptual universe into those things
to which a given word applies and those things to which it does not,
language becomes a source of dualism that requires rejection. So
characteristics of this mindless sort of dualism are railing against
Aristotle, Descartes, all logicians but Hegel (who, as Russell pointed
out, was one of the worst logicians in the history of philosophy) and
against language. They tend to talk indefinitely about the inadequacy of
language and the necessity of remaining silent (a necessity that is
often deficient in actuality, if I may borrow a phrase from Whitehead). 

> One of my basic questions has always been, "why insert a whole other 
> vocabulary (that of non-dualism) into something as fundamental to 
> Buddhist thought as the middle way?" (the 'Middle Way' being simply the 
> avoidance of falling into extremes).

Why insert the potentially misleading word "emptiness" into a discourse
that was already doing quite well with its synonym, "dependent"? I guess
people get bored with clarity. The teachings of Buddhism are just about
the most transparent and easy to understand of any in the history of the
world. A child can easily understand them. But how many people are
capable of following them and attaining nirvana? It's a little
embarrassing after a while to understand Buddhism really well and still
to be on the suffering side of nirvana. One of the best ways of dealing
with this embarrassment is to dive into obscurantism. Throw in a few
dozen obscure terms, use them inconsistently, keep saying that nobody
who has not attained the ninth level of bodhisattva training can
possibly grasp what the Buddha said, toss in some gibberish and tell
everyone that they have to pronounce it just right to get the desired
effect. Whenever people show dangerous signs of seeing through the scam,
tell them they are deluded and need a few more sesshins or empowerment
ceremonies, and bring them back into the darkness of manufactured
obscurity. If you keep that up long enough, you can keep people's mind
off the dharma almost indefinitely, thereby giving them an excuse for not
having attained nirvana. But at least they'll have an excuse and won't
feel obligated to feel embarrassed about still being shy of nirvana.

> But even so, I do concede that in meditation it is possible, and even
> common, to have some experience that can be described as somehow
> integrating disparate or contradictory 'extremes' such as subject and
> object or nirvana/samsara.

Yes, I think such experiences are pretty common among people who
practice certain types of meditative exercise.

> And further, that such experiences are quite powerful and often
> pleasurable. 

One could also say of such experiences, accurately I think, that they
are seductive and addictive. This is perhaps why it's helpful to have a
good friend on hand who can help one break through the addiction to
meditative states so that one get get on with more important tasks.

> Dogen called this moment the dropping away of body and mind.

That's an excellent phrase to describe a certain kind of experience that
comes sometimes with certain kinds of meditative exercise. 

> But for many Zen teachers, what they call 'non-dualism' has some
> significant and active component, a better mode of perception, 
> a superior understanding of something.

A lot of people are not very good at thinking clearly, so they need to
find a way of selling their lack of clarity as a kind of profundity.
(Didn't Nietzsche observe that those who are profound strive for clarity
while those who wish to appear profound strive for obscurity?) Although
not all Zen people are obscurantists, of course, a good many are. And of
course those who insist that what they do is superior betray, by the
very claim, that they have no idea what non-dualism means.

> Again, I suspect that many teachers are actually talking about this
> sort of experience, but lack the willingness to find a more honest and
> useful way of speaking about it, relying instead on this wishy-washy
> attempt to be evocative rather than descriptive.

Unfortunately, a lot of teachers become economically dependent on their
supporters and so must continue to tell their disciples that they are
deluded and therefore should give the teacher more money.

> I still see no reason to talk about non-dualism in regard to any of
> these notions or experiences. 

It's good you see no reason, for there IS no reason to talk about non-
dualism. Not much good comes of it, but perhaps not much harm comes of
it either. 

> I think it is just confusing, especially within the normative
> 'western' sensibility.  Whatever that is.

Well, people can get confused about just about anything. I know of quite
a few Christians who manage to get seriously confused by listening to
dualistic teachings. So maybe the nature of some people is to be
confused no matter what they are taught, while others manage to remain
pretty clear and loving no matter how you talk to them. (How's *that* for
a dualistic claim, eh?) Perhaps the nature of what is taught has very
little causal impact on clarity and confusion of mind.

> Now perhaps you can explain something to me. Does the word 'enlightened' 
> pertain to an action? 

I suppose it can pertain to anything that one who believes in enlightenment 
wishes the word to pertain to. It's just a fancy way of showing 
strong approval of something, to call it enlightened. I take it
that the maxim under question is said to make a simple point, namely,
that it is customary to think of a person as a long-term series of
events, while it is customary to think of an action as a fleeting event.

If one calls a person enlightened, then one seems to be saying that
everything she does deserves to be called enlightened. The Kathaa-vatthu
in the abhidhamma section of the Pali canon explicitly rejects the view
that everything the Buddha did was an enlightened action. Most of what
he did was what everyone else does: eat, sleep, defecate. So it would be
rather silly to call the Buddha an enlightened person, especially if so
saying would lead one to think that his eating was enlightened and his
sleeping was enlightened. Better to think that every now and then he
said something worth remembering. And if one really likes what he said,
then one could say he issued an enlightened saying.

> So enlightenment is just a name that means our approval of something. Is 
> that anything - anything at all?  And is that approval limited to a few, 
> or is it democratic?

Each person has his or her own judgements. I suppose if people were to
vote, then one could say of a given action at a given time that the
majority of eligible voters judged something to be an enlightened
action. My guess is that the results would vary considerably with the
eligibility of the voters. If everyone in the world could vote, then
only a minority would find the Buddha's doctrine of dependent
origination an enlightened teaching. If only Buddhists could vote, then
the results might be somewhat different. 

Buddhists, of course, interpret this to mean they they have a
particularly acute sense of what enlightenement is, while others are in
the dark. There is also something about the very idea of enlightenment
that smacks of self-importance and self-congratulation. Even if you deem
someone other than yourself to be enlightened, you are indirectly
congratulating yourself for knowing how to cast your vote.

Probably the best course of action is not to give enlightenment another
thought. I do not call such a course of action enlightened. I simply
call it good, and I call it that only because I call things good when
they don't annoy me. 

Enlightenment talk annoys me. It annoys me for the very same reason that
it annoys me when someone says "God wanted me to move to Colorado
Springs and start a megachurch." Such talk betrays an unwillingness to
own up to, and take full responsibility for, one's own particular forms
of madness. Speaking of enlightenment is no different from that.

> I can't remember where I read that there is no enlightened person--only
> enlightened actions.  Could this be part of the way to a saner Buddhism?

That is a wonderful saying. I also can't remember where I first
encountered it. Walt Whitman? Mark Twain? Thich Nhat Hanh? It may even
have been Sangharakshita; he does sometimes say things rather like
that. 

In my opinion, which has never been humble despite almost always being
wrong, the quotation you cite is indeed the beginning of a sane approach
to Buddhism.

> Almost everybody who is anybody in the Zen world talks about non-dualism 

Steven Collins once made the useful observation that in Theravada
Buddhism there is a sort of linguistic taboo against saying anything
that could be construed as a self. Aside from this linguistic taboo, he
suggests, there is not much to the doctrine of non-self; it is a taboo
the honoring of which makes one a Buddhist instead of a Hindu or a
Jaina. Denying self is what one DOES as a Buddhist. In a similar vein,
one could say that denying duality is what one DOES as a Zen Buddhist.
But aside from being a basis of esprit de corps and echte Zenlichkeit,
much as a secret handshake and a password serve as the basis of esprit
de corps in a college fraternity or in the Freemasons, there is not much
to non-dualism. Just nod and pretend to agree, and take it like a man
when the master hits you with a stick and calls you an incorrigible
idiot.

> There must be something to this popular dogma which is so obvious to
> many teachers. 

Why? When has popularity ever elevated a dogma to the status of being a
truth?

> Nondualism is merde, something one would rather not step in, but then there 
> those that swing that concept around like a battle axe.

Merde is especially hazardous in Buddhist settings, where people usually
walk around bare-footed. As for battle axes, we discourage them here on
buddha-l.

I suppose the doctrine of non-dualism comes about as a means of trying
to give metaphysical or epistemological footing to the Buddha's
excellent advice to cultivate impartiality (upek.saa). Not preferring
one thing to another is an excellent antidote to the sanctimoniousness
that sometimes arises from spending too much attention to being
wholesome. In Jungian terms, impartiality is a way of keeping the shadow 
at bay.

> You also note that one can see one's own beliefs in certain ways as well. 

Reflective people can do this, I am told. Indeed, a good deal of
philosophy is built on the supposition that one can willfully alter
one's beliefs as a result of seeing them as false or counterproductive. 

> So: why does shifting the way that one assesses one's own beliefs free
> one from delusion? 

If delusion is seen not as "seeing the world in some way other than it in
fact is", but rather as "seeing the world in a way that makes one suffer
needlessly", then choosing a system of beliefs that does not "make one
more unhappy than one has to be" is to free oneself, to some extent at
least, from delusion. That was my main point in general. The specific
application is that if one chooses to believe that enlightenment is both
possible and desirable, then one suffers if one also believes that one
has not attained it. 

There are two ways to avoid this unhappy coincidence of beliefs. First,
one can abandon the belief that enlightenment is possible. Second, one
can abandon the belief that one is not enlightened. I have known people
in both camps. In my experience, it gets pretty ugly when people think
they are enlightened (or saved in some other way). Not only are such
people prone to ugly behavior, but they are prone to behavior that
endangers the lives and safety of others. My aesthetic tastes therefore
incline me to abandoning the belief that enlightenment is possible.
Doing so does not make me or anyone else suffer in the least.

> I choose to be healthy, wealthy and handsome, but this is not made so by 
> virtue of the wish.

If you choose to see your appearance as handsome, your physical
condition as healthy and your financial status as wealthy, then choosing
to see things in that way is precisely what makes you healthy, wealthy
and handsome. Nothing else possibly could achieve that than your choice
to so believe.

> Buddha gives a diagnosis of our state of existence.

The Buddha said things that you chose to believe was a diagnosis of your
existence. You convinced youself, perhaps, that you are deluded in
thinking you are happy. Or you may have convinced yourself that you
engineered your own unhappiness. But what if you chose not to believe
such things? What if you were to believe that you are happy when you are
happy and unhappy at other times and that, as Clint Eastwood said,
"Deserve's got nothing to do with it."?

> We are not obliged to accept it. I don't see any attempt to persuade. It 
> is up to us if we want to hear it or read it.  If we want to dismiss it, 
> we are at liberty (bad choice of word) to do so.

Yes, of course. That is exactly my point. But it does not answer my real
question. My question is: are we better off when we choose to believe it
that if we choose to believe otherwise? And by what criterion could one
possibly have any confidence that she has correctly assessed whether or
not she is better off one way than another?

> I feel that the 'best' is realisable - it becomes a real possibility -
> the more I practise 'better'.

But what could be better than believing that nothing could be better than
how you are right now?

> The view I've encountered most often is that one needn't be a Buddha to
> speak as a Buddha does.

My favorite analogy on this topic is of the kinds of farmers. It occurs
somewhere in the Pali canon. Some farmers cultivate both their own
fields and the fields of others, and some cultivate only the fields of
others. Some cultivate only their own fields, and some cultivate no
fields at all. Similarly, some teachers practice what they preach, and
others do not. Some people do not preach what they practice, and some
people neither preach nor practice. But even those who do not follow
their own teachings give perfectly good teachings to others that may
bring them great benefit. This would seem to imply that a teacher could
bring another to nirvana but fail to attain nirvana himself. My guess is
that this sort of teacher is rather common...or would be, if nirvana
were indeed possible.

> This is why T'ien T'ai non-dualism trumps Madhyamika emptiness.

Anyone who still thinks in terms of trumping has not even made it to
first base as a non-dualist. But don't feel bad. Non-dualism is such a
ludicrous parody of Buddhism that you're much better off not going
there. It's easier to stick with Madhyamaka (not Madhyamika) and to let
people imagine they have trumped you.

Anyone for a quick game of whist?

> what would the Buddha say to Walt Whitman?

Gotama would start with something like this: "Don't write any more
disgraceful propaganda rationalizing the unjustifiable American
aggression against Mexico, and stop referring to Mexicans as
uncultivated savages." 

Of course that was 160 years ago. If Whitman were alive today he would
be trying to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in about the same
terms he once tried to justify the illegal invasion of Mexico. And
Gotama (my Gotama, at any rate) would still be remonstrating with him
about being such a knee-jerk patriot. I can't imagine Gotama having any
sympathy at all with any kind of patriotism, especially the totally
diseased sort of blind patriotism that has conquered the American mind.

> Of course, chanting by ordinary Western lay people is not always beautiful

Chanting by Theravadin monks can also be decidedly unmelodious, even
cacophonous. It depends on how much the monks adhere to the Buddha's
advice not to make beautiful sounds lest it distract from the meaning of
the words. The local Thai monks in Albuquerque chant in a pretty
unappetizing way. First they chant in unmusical Pali and then in equally
unmusical English translation. They also hand out a booklet to visitors
that has the Pali text with an interlinear translation so that everyone
can know what they are chanting.

Years ago I had a long discussion with a bhikkhu about chanting, and he
said that ideally when several people are chanting together, they should
each be in a slightly different key, so as to avoid harmony that might
sound beautiful to the ear. I have no idea how frequently this advice is
given, but my experience in listening to monks is that it is commonly
observed. Most monks I have heard chanting make Bob Dylan sound like
Luciano Pavarotti. 

I have also heard that one should never let the voice hit two notes in
the same syllable; in other words the voice should not glide from one
note to another. Each syllable should be distinctly pronounced and on a
distinctive note.

Clearly there are Buddhists who prefer a relatively non-aesthetic, even
anti-aesthetic, approach to dharma recitation and other rituals, while
others (such as Sangharakshita) emphasize the importance of beauty in
ritual. To my mind, the most sensible advice in this matter, as in so
many other matters, is from Buddhaghosa. For people given to sensual
attachments, he says, beautiful surroundings and beautiful rituals
should be avoided. For people given to hatred or depression, beautiful
surroundings and beautiful rituals can be a useful antidote to their
particular maladies. For intellectuals, it makes no difference, since
they tend to be indifferent to their surroundings.

> I was simply pointing out why it may have become a fixed tradition to
> recite in Pali (in Theravada), namely, because they were supposedly
> the words (stricto sensu) of the Buddha himself and or related
> reasons.

I have to admit that chanting the refuges and precepts in Pali still
gives me a thrill, mostly because I am aware that these very words have
been chanted every day for the past two thousand years or so. I have no
idea when the Pali language began or where it comes from, but it was
probably within a few hundred years of when the Buddha lived, so the
Pali version of the refuges and precepts has a long history with which
it is wonderful to be connected.

> And in spite of His position, as cited by Richard, the Indic idea of
> word in the original having special power persisted.

It did indeed. The best efforts of the best minds in Indian Buddhism
could not change that deeply ingrained habit. The position that was
taken up by many Indian Buddhist philosophers was that words have some
kind of power, not because of any intrinsic power of the sound, but
because of the conviction of the mutterer. And it was always said by
many that mantras and so forth have the power to attain worldly goals
but no power at all to help one attain lokuttara goals. So mantras came
to be seen as something like money: useful in ordinary life but useless
as part of a spiritual practice.

> And for those of us in North America and Europe we should be careful
> about the assumptions we make about "our own" culture. Should we have
> linguistically segregated congregations so that everyone gets to chant
> in "their own" language? 

Why not? 

> In virtually every Western society there are linguistic minorities
> (sometimes quite large, like the Spanish speaking population in the US)

When I have gone to Catholic mass in New Mexico, I have noticed that
they tend to be bilingual, about equally English and Spanish. Even the
local Unitarians sing the doxology in both Spanish and English. When I
lived in Québec I attended various church services and noticed that
everything was done in French in a French-speaking diocese and in
English in an English-speaking diocese. Some Anglicans made a point of
using both official languages. It seems to work out pretty well. 

My observation of the Western Buddhist Order is that they have some
chants in Sanskrit and Pali, followed by saying the same thing in the
local language(s). I attended a WBO retreat in India, for example, and
we chanted everything in Pali, Hindi, Marathi and English. I rather
liked it. Chanting in Hindi and Marathi helped me feel a sense of
solidarity with the Indians there, in about the way that attending a
mass in which the hymns are sung in Spanish gives me a sense of
solidarity with my fellow New Mexicans. Making an effort to sing or
chant in the language of a people who occupy the same land as oneself is
a significant gesture of friendship. And there is probably no practice
in Buddhism more central than the cultivation of friendship. So this
pretty much makes the use of local languages a vital practice in
Buddhism.

> (1) Let us not forget that Buddhism is from India, and the Indic
> tradition, back to Vedic times apparently, includes the idea that
> there is a sort of cosmic (magical?) power or, if you want, ritual
> effectiveness to the very syllables of a Skt/Pali chan, and to their
> correct pronunciation.

We should also remember that there were Buddhists in India who
strenuously repudiated the very claim you mention. In fact, in numerous
passages in the Pali canon, the Buddha says that one of the many things
that distinguishes him and his monks from other teachers and their monks
is that he does not drone mantras and other things that no one
understands. Bear in mind that brahmans chanted Vedic, a language that
was already quite difficult for people to understand by the time of the
Buddha. One gets the impression that he found conservatives, who
preferred the word to the meaning, ridiculous. A very funny satire of
these gibberish-droning brahmans appears in Sutta-nipaata.  

I recall reading some time ago that the Buddha did not want his monks to
chant rhythmically and melodically lest people get them confused with
brahmans. Probably he would give other reasons nowadays. Now he would
probably say he doesn't want his disciples chanting mantras lest people
get them confused with new age space cadets.

> In other words, and to put it bluntly, isn't the idea of chanting in one's
> own language largely a Western affectation?

As far as I know, most Asian Buddhists chant syllables that they barely
understand. But why would you call it an "affectation" to chant
something that you understand instead of something that is gibberish to
you? I should think it more an affectation to do the opposite. But then
I guess I have been overly influence by the Buddha's urging his
disciples always to talk about dharma in the local language and always
to chant in such a way that people can understanding the meaning of the
text being chanted. Otherwise, one is just making unnecessary noise,
nicht wahr?

> A specific example of the Buddhist use of liturgical languages (and
> one that I am very interested in) is the chanting done by Japanese and
> Korean Buddhists.

For years I practiced Korean-style Zen. Most of our chanting was of
Chinese texts rendered into Korean syllabics, which we anglos pronounced
with heavy Canadian English accents. The Koreans in the congregation
could not understand our pronunciation, nor could they understand what
they were saying when they chanted the Chinese pronounced the Korean
way. Offhand, I can't think of anything much more ridiculous. We might
as well have chanted "Eenie meenie mynie mo, with a hey nonny and a hey
nonny no!"

> Also - do Theravadin Buddhists chant in Pali, or in "their 
> own" language?

In Pali as pronounced locally.

> Call it what you will - just so long as we are clear that what you are 
> insisting on is something that has never been a generally accepted
> practice in the 2500 year history of Buddhism in Asia.

Well, monks fly around in airplanes now and use computers, which have
never been generally accepted practices. Personally, I see no great harm
in change, as long as its for the good. And I think making things
understandable is good, arguably even better than flying around in
airplanes and using computers.

> I am personally much more concerned with how the chants sound.

That is precisely what the Buddha warned against. When people became
intrigued with the sound, they fail to focus on the meanings of the
words. This is why he forbade chanting.

> The Great Dharani, for example, is a very beautiful sounding chant -
> but when you translate it into English it is largely meaningless mumbo
> jumbo.

I have never seen this in the original language. It's one of the things
we used to chant in anglicized Sino-Korean. Attempts have been made to
reconstruct the original Sanskrit (if indeed it was ever originally in
Sanskrit). As far as anyone can tell, it's essentially mumbo jumbo even
in the original, as are many dharanis that appear in Mahayana texts.

> But it sure does sound nice "in the original".

De gustibus non disputandum est. I never much liked it, but I did find
it a useful way of cultivating patience.

> And then there's the Heart Sutra - the Japanese, Korean and Chinese 
> versions have a rhythm and musicality that is completely lost in
> translation. 

That depends entirely on the style. The chanting of the Heart Sutra I
have heard most often is ugliness personified--nothing but a bunch of
rapid-fire staccato macho bellowing. My testosterone level doubles every
time I hear it. On the other hand, I have heard it chanted in English in
ways that make it sound very beautiful. If you use melodies and rhythms
that fit the English language, it can be made so sound lovely, if that
is what you are after.

Oh, and by the way, when the Heart Sutra, the Kanzeon Sutra and the
Diamon-cutter Sutras are chanted in the languages you mention, they are
in translation.

> Yet another example is the "Kanzeon Sutra". When done in the Japanese
> version it is, in my opinion, a genuinely transforming experience -
> but the English translations are flat and lifeless.

That has nothing to do with its being in English. Don't forget that most
translations are done by pedantic philologists who know next to nothing
about either philosophy or poetry. I've never done a systematic study,
but I'd estimate that 98% of everything translated from Asian languages
is just plain awful as English literature. Dharma texts in translation
are often ghastly at the beginning, ghastly in the middle and ghastly at
the end. But it needn't be that way. Indeed, I think if people get truly
inspired, they will produce beautiful English texts. And then we won't
have to choose between chanting beautiful texts that no one understands
and chanting flat and lifeless texts that everyone understands.

> We are clearly in the realm of the subjective here.
> To be honest I just don't think that Western Buddhism has yet produced
> the personell who are QUALIFIED to compete with such works of
> art as the Morning Bell Chant in Sino-Korean, for example. That will 
> require people who are, first of all, fully enlightened

How quickly we move from the realm of the subjective to the realm of the
ridiculously dogmatic. Thanks for the giggle.

> Agreeing with James that we can have an interpretation that is true
> while denying (in reference to Pope B.XVI) "that anyone can know what it
> is"...don't jive.

That is certainly not what I intended to say. What I intended to say was
that there may well be truth but that it could also be that no one knows
what that truth is. That is my position, and I think it comes close to
James's position. In his essay on truth in his book on Pragmatism, he
describes truth as something organic that changes with circumstances.
Among the circumstances that change are our own opinions about things,
which may have the potential to change realities.

> What point then is saying there is a truth but no one "knows what it is"? 

The point, I think, is to distinguish between those things for which
"there is no truth to the matter" and realities that we are not in a
position to know about. I would say there is no truth to the matter in
moral claims. They are pure opinion. Whether there is life on a planet
going around a star a million light years from here is an issue to which
there is a truth, but no one here is currently in a position to know
what it is. I find that a useful distinction. 

> Epistemological humility fits well with both Buddhism and pragmatism,
> but most Buddhisms do hold out for the possibility of knowing both kinds
> of truth, relative and absolute, no?

Therein, in my opinion, lies the deficiency of Buddhism and the
superiority of Pragmatism. Others, of course, would say just the
opposite.

> I would question both of these assumptions: (1) that Socialism's 
> moorings are Religious, and (2) that Religions have in general been
> founded by people who advocate for the poor and oppressed.

You should read The Communist Manifesto someday. Never was a more
obviously religious text written. Socialism is rooted firmly in the
values of the European Enlightenment, and that is religious to the very
bottom. 

If you can find a single religion that was not founded by people
who advocated for the poor and the oppressed, name it.

>  But I see both of those as side issues.

Yes, because you know you are wrong. When people are wrong about
something, they always regard what they were wrong about as trivial.

> I hope this isn't putting words in your mouth - but I absolutely agree
> that Socialism is the only conceivable result of an analysis of human
> society that is both rational and compassionate. The fact that it is
> so easy to see - but so hard to actually do anything about is
> something that I think has yet to be adequately explained.

Those are close to the very words I would have put into my mouth. As for
why it is hard to implement socialism, the reason for that is fairly
simple, I think. Billions of dollars have been spent to discredit it in
every way and to link it with unpopular causes. The history of the
incessant campaign against socialism is the richest harvest of red
herrings in the universe. You could feed every man, woman and child for
a millennium on all those red herrings. (And since red herrings, unlike
fishy herrings, are a pure vegetable product, even vegans can eat 
them.)

> Well, comrade, as far as I am concerned, all indoctrination is not 
> created equal. Socialist "propaganda", if you will, is absolutely
> necessary to counter the "manufactured consent" of the masses in their
> own exploitation.

Here we part company. I take the Buddhist path of fighting lies with
truth, not with further lies. Alas, one of the failures of socialism has
been its fondness for fighting lies with even bigger lies and to
suppress all truths that do not serve the Revolution. That policy is,
well, revolting. 

> I don't know that we are dealing only with opinions.  People (sometimes
> large crowds of them) have experienced visitations by those who had passed
> from this realm of existence.

The problem, of course, is that there are no uninterpreted facts of the
matter. There are people who interpret their experiences within the
framework of a belief that visitations from those who have passed beyond
this realm are possible. Those who operate within a different framework,
however, would interpret those experiences differently. 

And so I think we are still dealing here almost entirely with opinion.
For that reason, I would still want to see with William James that the
great diversity of possible ways of interpreting our experience
"absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the
meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it
commands us to tolerate, respect and indulge those whom we see
harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however
unintelligible those may be to us. Hands off: neither the whole of truth
nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each
observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar
position in which he stands. Even prisons and sick-rooms have their
special revelations. It is enough to ask of each of us that he is
faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own
blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast
field." (Final paragraph in essay entitled "On a certain blindness in
human beings.")

In another essay, James observes that it is reality that gives warrant
to our conviction that an opinion is true, then he goes on to say "but
what becomes our warrant for calling anything reality? The only reply
is---the faith of the present critic or inquirer. At every moment of his
life he finds himself subject to a belief in some realities, even though
his realities of this year should prove to be his illusions of the
next.... We are ourselves the critics here; and we shall find our burden
much lightened by being allowed to take reality in this relative and
provisional way." (From the essay "The function of cognition" in his
book The Meaning of Truth, 1909.)

Of course Nagarjuna (as I interpret him) beat James to this point by two
millennia, and the Buddha (as I interpret him) beat Nagarjuna to the
same point by another six or seven hundred years. 

James, probably more than Nagarjuna and the Buddha, speaks to our modern
condition. As Charles Taylor points out (Sources of the Self: The Making
of Modern Identity, section 1.3 et passim), the commonplace of our time
in history is that there are no absolute frameworks, no frameworks that
are universally accepted as being founded on unquestionable fact. And in
the face of this lack of absolute frameworks, observes Taylor, there are
various strategies of coping. One strategy is to accept one traditional
framework as absolute, and in so doing to declare most of the modern
world as decadent and dangerous and, in some sense at least, an enemy of
truth. (Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope John Paul II, Osama bin Ladin, George
W. Bush, Bhikkhu Bodhi and Sangharakshita all offer versions of this
strategy.) Another strategy is to take on views provisionally,
ironically and heuristically, acknowledging them to be meaningful to
oneself but not necessarily to other people. (Swami Vivekananda, Richard
Rorty, most Quakers and Unitarians, Tenzin Gyatso and Stephen Batchelor
all offer versions of this strategy.) Some who adopt this strategy, says
Taylor, may be unaware of their own uncertainties, while others are
fully aware of how uncertain they are and happily designate themselves
"seekers" and "drifters."  

> But granted there are things that function solely on
> mechanical principles, these are artificially constructed by beings (human
> beings) who do not operate only on mechanical principles.  How is this
> possible?

You are committing the fallacy of begging the question. The very thing
that is controverted is whether or not human beings operate only on
mechanical principles. And on this, opinion is divided and has been for
a very long time, and I see no prospects for anyone providing conclusive
evidence for one side or the other of the debate. In other words, both
sides are operating entirely on faith. But that's fine, so long as we
allow each man or woman the freedom to follow the kind of faith that his
or her conditioning makes possible.

> Actually, this Pope was his own person and not nearly as rigid as 
> rigid liberals seem to characterize him.

Forget the terms "liberal" and "conservative", for they have pretty much
lost all meaning in today's world. The Pope's anti-Communist views seem
to have prevented him from seeing any validity in the work of Romero and
other liberation theologians, which seems to me to represent an
inflexibility, almost a blindness.

> For example, anyone who disagrees that abortion, the destruction of
> the traditional family, euthenasia, and the like are fundamentally
> good for any society is termed "rigid," whereas anyone who agrees with
> this nexus of agendas is, what, "progressive," "forward
> looking," "intelligent," "visionary"?

That is your perception, and a bad one, I would add. It certainly does
not fit the case of how I have used words. I would call a person rigid
if and only if he or she were, well, rigid. Rigidity to me implies an
unyielding and uncompromising stance, especially an unhelpful one. The
contrastive term to "rigid" to my ear is "flexible" rather than
"progressive" or "intelligent". I think there is no doubt at all that
the Pope was intelligent and even visionary. In many respects he was
also quite progressive, for example in his long-overdue apology to the
Jews and his rapprochement with the Muslims. In other areas, however,
especially those involving resistant to right-wing totalitarians in
Central America, his stance was, I think, tragically rigid and short-
sighted.

> I would agree that the terms "liberal" and "conservative" are not simple
> referents, but it is overstating the case by claiming that they've lost
> "all meaning" in contemporary society.

They still have value as words used to bludgeon and belittle one's
enemies. Aside from that, however, they are almost perfectly useless.

> As for the Pope's anti-Communist views, these are the results of his
> very rich and nuanced personalist philosophy whereby any proper
> response to the person can only be that of love, i.e., seeking the
> well-being of the Other.

That's also what Marxism is all about, Stan. So you'd think a good
Catholic would almost automatically be an ardent Marxist.

> His contention with liberation theology was not that there was no
> validity, but that Marxist ideological concerns were substituting for
> the theological virtues and the fuller demands of justice.

What he failed to see, however, is that for the liberation theologians
there is no real conflict between Marxist and Catholic ideologies. Yes,
there have been flaws and miscarriages of justice in the implementation
of both ideologies, but as ideologies they are quite compatible.

> I won't quibble over contrastive terms to "rigid", but I do wonder what
> you mean by claiming that John Paul was tragically rigid and shortsighted
> in his dealing with issues of injustice in Central America.

Which word did you not understand?

> Have you read his speeches and sermons given in the countries he
> visited where the "resistance" was operative, for instance, in El
> Salvador? 

Read? Read? this is the age of television, man. I saw his speeches and
sermons on television.

> Ideology is trumping reality in your claims here, Ricardo.

As I have made abundantly clear in other contexts, I don't give a damn
about reality. Any ideology that is too feeble to trump reality is not
worth proclaiming. The whole purpose of any ideology is to change
reality. 

As I have said about the Pope, he used his ideological influence to
change many realities. He apologized for the Crusades and the
Inquisition and for Catholic silence during the holocaust, for example.
He was the first pope to visit a synagogue and the first to visit a
mosque. He donated generously to help rebuild the Buddhist sangha in
Cambodia. He criticized the United States for its unwarranted and
illegal detention of suspected terrorists without trial and without
being charged with specific crimes. And he proclaimed, and consistently
held to, the policy of "a culture of life." His advocacy of the culture
of life led him to criticize the United States for failing to abolish
the death penalty, and for not dismantling its nuclear arms network and
for the totally unnecessary and unprovoked invasions of Afghanistan and
Iraq, as well as for its sluggishness in enforcing important
environmental regulations. (It's a crime that some Americans have
hijacked the name "culture of life" but abandoned the full ideology that
the name stands for. Thus we have the spectacle of an American president
who speaks of the "culture of life" while advocating the death penalty
and starting a war that has led to the deaths of more than 100,000
mostly innocent people.) 

In all these ideological proclamations that totally ignored operative
realities, I can only applaud the late Pontiff, for in all of these ways
his Catholic ideology was completely in accord with my own Buddhist
ideology. In Central America, however, he fumbled the ball, showing
that, like all of us, he was capable of being rigid and short-sighted.
In most of us, short-sighted rigidity is merely part of the standard
equipment of being human, all too human. In an otherwise great man, this
flaw is tragic, in the Greek sense of the term.

Speaking of spectacles, one of the most embarrassing moments for us
Americans during the vigil leading up to the Pope's death was hearing a
rerun of Nancy Reagan's appearance on the Larry King show in which she
enumerated all the ways in which Pope John Paul II resembled Saint
Ronnie the Communicator. (They were both victims of assassination
attempts in 1981, and they both brought down the iron curtain, and they
were both actors, and they both loved the outdoors, and they both loved
to hug children, and...and...and....)

It's all past now. As the Buddhist meditation on death reminds its
practitioners, all men and women die, whether they lived as sages or as
fools, whether they were virtuous or vicious, whether they were known to
everyone alive or known only to the lice who lived in their hair. The
death of a celebrity such the pope serves to remind us all of our own
inevitable deaths, a reality that no ideology can trump.

> Wouldn't it be a much simpler (and more straightforward) answer to say 
> that sexual abstinence is demanded because monks are supposed to conquer 
> the desire for sex? Or do you actually mean that these rules have 
> nothing to do with desire?

Yes, I actually mean that these rules have nothing to do with desire.
They have everything to do with avoiding social disapproval, and also of
setting a decorous example to the laity. It was to avoid social
disapproval that the monastic code had rules against monks laughing
boisterously in the company of the laity or using coarse language. When
monks were in the company only of other monks, however, laughter was not
against the rules. No one thought laughter was itself an obstacle to
spiritual attainment.

As I mentioned in another message, a monk or nun could be kicked out of
the order for a lifetime if guilty of having sexual relations with
another being. Being guilty of masturbation, however, was much less
serious, because society did not disapprove of that quite as much as
they disapproved of religious mendicants doing "unseemly" actions with
human beings, corpses, animals and trees. If the purpose of the rules
had been to avoid the gratification of sexual desire as such, then ALL
forms of sexual gratification would be seen as equally destructive of
the yogin's resolve.

Moreover, as has been pointed out before in this thread, there are
plenty of instances where laity are attained to the status of ariya-
puriso and attained refined states of jhaana, which shows that celibacy
was not seen as necessary to make significant spiritual progress. So
celibacy, we can conclude, was seen as desirable not because marriage or
sexuality was seen as inherently obstructive to spiritual progress, but
because society withheld approval of sexually active people who sought
alms as a religious practice.

There are inconsistencies in monastic rules, and most of them can be
traced, I think, to inconsistencies in popular conceptions of what is
acceptable in "polite" society.

>  Remember that now and again in Suttas Buddha treats women not as
> polluting for a monk so much as a distraction - as in His initial
> refusal to allow female bhikkhuni - quite different from much of the
> justification for monastic celibacy (the very phrase seems redundant)
> in Christiaan Europe in the Middle Ages.

It's true that the Buddha reportedly said that there is no greater
distraction to a man than a woman (I guess we was talking about men
under the age of thirty) and no greater distraction to a woman than a
man. But the refusal to allow women to join his monastic community is
reportedly based on his fear that people would talk, saying things such
as "The Buddha allowed women into the community to gratify the sexual
urges of monks." (Apparently the people were unaware of all the fun
monks were having with trees, monkeys, skulls and indeed with each
other.) As everyone knows, the Buddha was talked into allowing women to
take ordination, and, just as he predicted, tongues began to wag.

> Even without a very thorough knowledge of Vinaya texts, is seems logical 
> that attaining nirvana must rest on transcending the attachments created 
> by - among other things - a sexual life. 

That is completely illogical. Nirvana IS the extinction of desires, so
it cannot possibly depend on it. Giving up desires is not a precondition
of attaining nirvana. Rather, it is a description of what has happened
in the attainment of nirvana. What is necessary to attain the abandoning
of desires is simply knowing that desires, when fulfilled, leave one's
craving unfulfilled. It could be argued (and probably would be argued by
many psychologists today) that indulging in one's desires and studying
the consequences of doing so is far more effective in abandoning the
habit of fulfilling desires than simply abstaining from something
because someone else says it is a good idea.

> The idea of being without sensual attachments (a prerequisite for
> nivana, I guess) and still having a sexual life seems absurd.

Yes, it may seem absurd to have a sexual life without sexual desire, but
I'm not sure it's that simple. I can easily imagine doing things without
having any desire at all to do them. But that issue aside, it is simply
false to think that abandoning sexual activity is a prerequisite of
nirvana. Here, I am speaking mostly of earlier Buddhism. It's true that
there are Mahayana texts making the rather ridiculous claim that anyone
who has had sexual relations in this life cannot attain nirvana in this
life. If that were true, then Gotama was not a buddha after all.

> Although early Buddhism rejected extreme asceticism, it still endorsed
> renunciation and demanded sexual abstinence of those who took it up.
> And also many later Buddhist schools kept running monastic
> institutions. Why?

Every society needs a place to keep social misfits and incompetents.
Such people used to be kept in monasteries. Now they are kept in
prisons (which, if Foucault is right, evolved out of monasteries) and in
universities (which also evolved out of monasteries).

> I don't think this is only a matter of sociology (not having children
> to care for), but because sexual abstinence as a "body technique" (in
> a Maussian sense) affects the mind in ways that are considered
> necessary for higher concentrations, although I admit, this is only a
> guess.

I must say I'm suspicious of any language that suggests that some
concentrations are higher than others. What many classical Buddhist
texts suggest is that some mental states involve a more lasting
eudaemonia than others, but there is no suggestion (as far as I know)
that these more eudaemonic states are available only to celibates.

> OK, if we talk about celibacy. But what is demanded is sexual abstinence 
> in all forms (of which quite a lot have nothing to do with reproduction).

A huge number of rules in the Buddhist vinaya are driven by
considerations of what is seemly or socially acceptable. Having sexual
relations with trees (which is actually forbidden) was banned because
the people who supported the monastic community with alms were likely to
look with disfavor upon monks humping trees. People were very prudish in
those days.

> With all due respect, I don't see why merely having wives, mistresses or
> pets would, in and of themselses, would impede begging. Beggars throughout
> history have had wives and children, whom they often inveigled into begging
> as well. 

Religious mendicants in Magadha at the time of the Buddha were expected
to be celibate. If you read the commentaries to the vinaya rules you
find it said again and again that Buddhist monks were expected to follow
various rules, lest the village people talk. Apparently one of the
things that caused villagers to talk was religious beggars who had
families to support. Moreverover, the Buddha seems to have been mindful
of taking precautions against his community being any kind of burden on
the supporting community. That is the reason for celibacy stated in the
vinaya.

> I daresay the women would not have put up with monasticism, either!

Why not? Don't you think some women would prefer a well-behaved husband
to a gambler, drinker and womanizer?

> If there are, conceptually, sentient beings which lack Buddha nature,
> are they responsible for their misdeeds?

I'm not sure where this idea of icchantikas originated. My main
association with it is the Lankaavataara Suutra. Icchantikas are
described there as beings who have consistently chosen unwholesome
mental states for so long that they are no longer capable even of
thinking of being wholesome. (Note how I desist from making any
Republican jokes here.) The moral of that story seems to be that
icchantikas are responsible for their misdeeds, since they have become
icchantikas as a result of their personal choices. The logic is rather
like what we follow when we hold a person accountable for his actions
while his judgment is impaired as a result of deliberately becoming
intoxicated. 

The interesting aspect of icchantika theory is that the sutra goes on to
say that for every icchantika there is a bodhisattva who will not give
up trying to save him. (Sorry for all the sexist language; I am well
aware that girls can be icchantikas, too!) This introduces an element of
grace. 

As one of my former colleagues at McGill observed, grace is the joker in
the deck. If there is a wild card in the deck, then all odds are thrown
off. In Indian philosophy, mixing the doctrine of karma with the
doctrine of God (at least any notion of God that includes such
characteristics as omniscience, omnipotence and perfect compassion) led
to untractable paradoxes about theodicy. The Buddhists exploited these
paradoxes to the hilt when refuting the theory that there is an
omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly compassionate God. If God can alter
the natural course of karma, said the Buddhists, then the fact that some
people are allowed to suffer the ill effects of their bad karma, while
others are not, suggests that God is cruel and capricious (rather like
what some people call a terrorist). On the other hand, if God cannot
alter the natural course of karma, then God is not much better than an
accountant who keeps track of other people's money. So Buddhists tended
to argue that all talk of karma is incompatible with belief in God. And
within Buddhism, similar considerations led some Buddhists to reject
conceptions of buddhahood that made buddhas in important ways like God.

At least one Christian writer I am aware of, Fr. Thomas Hand, SJ, argues
that the doctrine of grace is incompatible with the notion that Christ's
crucifixion was an atonement of sin. Atonement, he argues, is usually
understood as the paying of a debt. Grace, however, is not the payment
of a debt, but rather the forgiving of a debt. One cannot possibly earn
grace, since the very idea of grace is the giving of a gift that one in
no way deserves. This line of thinking would entail the consequence that
grace is also incompatible with karma. So, it would seem, if one wishes
to be consistent, one must make a choice between the doctrine of grace
and the doctrine of karma. To try to hold both can lead only to
confusion.

> Historically, it seems that the doctrine was, all things being equal,
> basically either taken as axiomatic or denied to be a coherent concept.

Yes, I think that is true. The doctrine of karma worked pretty well so
long as no one began to ask too many questions about it. Once it is
examined, however, it proves to be quite untenable. One could, of
course, wave one's hands and say "Oh, it is mysterious and beyond all
human understanding. The Buddha even said as much!" But if one takes
that route then one ignores an important tendency in much of Buddhism to
eschew mystery and stick with doctrines that are clear and
comprehensible. Moreover, if one decries critical investigations into
the doctrine of karma on the grounds that it is a mystery that
transcends the human intellect, then one can hardly criticize any other
religion that says that there are mysteries. If, for example, a Buddhist
thinks that karma is a mystery, then it is inconsistent for that
Buddhist to dismiss theories of the world in which God plays a role.

Suppose a Buddhist admits that the doctrine of karma is incomprehensible
and should therefore be rejected. Does the Buddhist thereby cease to be
a Buddhist?

> Beside that,  I  think  that the usual understanding of the Kalama sutta
> is quite unwholesome. According to Buddhist teaching, our samsaric stream
> of  consciousness  is characterized by ignorance, so how could we rely
> on ignorance to make our decisions? I have never understood it.

I am not sure what the "usual understanding" of the so-called Kalama
Sutta (more properly called the Kesaputtiya, as I recall) is. The sutta
itself is not really very confusing, but in English translation it
becomes confusing. 

The sutta warns against speculation and being swayed by people who are
expert in quoting traditional texts and recommends listening to the wise
and seeing for oneself whether they are giving good advice with respect
to what is healthy (kusala) and what is unhealthy (akusala).

There is nothing at all mysterious about this message, nor is it
inconsistent in any way. According to nearly all the buddhist texts I
have studied, the consciousness of ordinary people is capable of
ignorance, but no one (except perhaps for some interpreters of the Lotus
Sutra) says ordinary consciousness is completely and hopelessly
ignorant. For the most part, we can see pretty clearly, but sometimes we
have blind spots, and they get us into trouble (dukkha). If we could not
see pretty clearly in the first place, dharma would make no sense to us
at all. But dharma does make sense to most of us, even if we do fail
sometimes (or, in my case, nearly all the time) to put it into perfect
practice. 

The problem, as I have said many times, is not that the buddhas' dharma
is difficult to comprehend but that even most of those who comprehend
it, even those who comprehend it quite well, have bad habits, such as
laziness and anxiety and maliciousness and various addictions, that
undermine their efforts.

> And sometimes it may be necessary to bend the truth to the advantage
> of a greater good.

If there is such a thing as truth, is it the sort of thing that can
bend? If so, how? While I am not entirely convinced that there is such a
thing as truth, I do think there may be such a thing as sincerity,
although I rarely witness it. Can one bend sincerity? It seems to me
that one cannot, for sincerity is saying what you mean and meaning what
you say. 

> My reading of Foucault and Hadot convinced me that the Greeks were not 
> familiar with the concept of sin which developed in Christendom and 
> became even hereditary because of St. Paul. 

I quite agree. The Christians redefined the Greek word that earlier
Greeks had used to mean damage. For the Christians that same word came
to mean disobedience to God. All this means is that one has to be
careful to specify in which sense one is using the word "sin". There is
no need to avoid it altogether.

> I think that eating the apple was more then just missing the mark or damage. 

There was no mention of an apple in the garden of Eden. What was eaten
was the fruit of the tree of knowledge of the difference between good
and evil. In eating of this fruit, Adam and Eve missed the mark, because
they had been told not to eat it. This shows that in some theological
contexts the principal way of missing the mark or doing damage is to
disobey God. But if one is an atheist, one will not see sin in this way.
One will just see it as failing.

> Fairness (like truth) is a concept. I said "CONCEPT", inherently 
> ingrained and evolved in the brains of humans (maybe some animals for 
> all I know). But it requires a "judgment" on the event that can almost 
> never be the same for all possible persons or groups judging the event.

I think this is probably why the highest of all the brahma-vihaaras is
impartiality or indifference (upekshaa). It is considered to be the
highest form of friendship, beating out such contenders as compassion
and sympathetic joy. The reason impartiality is highest is because it is
most in keeping with how things are, which is, well, just how they are.
How things are cannot be valued as unambiguously good or bad, happy or
sad. If the fawn survives, the coyote starves. If the coyote eats, the
fawn dies. There is no way to look at this except with impartial eyes.
If the freedom-fighters win, the empire collapses. If the empire
survives, the freedom-fighters will be labeled "terrorist" and will die.
And so it goes.

> I am sorry. I have a hard time understanding either fairness or truth 
> except as relative to the point of view of the participants.

Well said. I am reminded of an observation made by Stanley Fish. He was
talking about Chaucer, I think, and I know you're a fan of Chaucer.
Talking about reading Chaucer, Fish said something like this: We like to
believe that there is an objective reading of a text and that everything
that differs from that "objective" reading is an interpretation. But the
opposition is not between objective readings and interpretations. The
real opposition is between interpretations made by people who know they
are interpreting and interpretations made by people who don't.

If we accept the idea, articulated by some wise guys or perhaps wise
men, life itself is pretty much like a text, and all of us who live it
are pretty much like readers. Some of us like to believe that some folks
know the truth and others are just making stuff up. But the real
opposition is between people who make stuff up and know they are making
stuff up and people who make stuff up without realizing that is what
they are doing. Beware the latter. They join groups. And groups are
invariably dangerous. (Or as Kierkegaard put it, "the crowd is
untruth.")

> All right, but if you ask why anyone should do what's beneficial etc. or
> why one should try to become a bodhisattva, the answere is not that this
> is some general duty or a Godgiven command, but that this is personal
> progress which leads to true happiness and the ideal is to become a arhant
> or boeddha, which is a clearcut human ideal with specific qualities.
> The difference between kinds of ethics is not just a matter of definition.

With respect, I think you're wrong about this. Deontology is defined
simply as the study of moral imperatives. It is not built in to the
notion of deontology that the imperative is issued by God or President
Bush or by a body of lawgivers. The injunction of Buddhism "Do good,
avoid evil and and keep the mind pure" is an imperative. Indeed, it is
seen as the principal imperative from which all particular precepts are
derived. So one can study this imperative deontologically without any
commitment to a superhuman, subhuman or human lawgiver. It could be seen
as a kind of natural law. Indeed, I think most Indian concepts of Dharma
are seen as descriptions of the natural universe. "Eat too much and
exercise to little, and you will get fat." "Speak harshly to others and
they will resent you." "Act with kindness and you will enjoy happiness."
So I think the presupposition in India is that such imperatives
(attended by the consequences that go with ignoring them) are part of
the natural world, but they are imperatives all the same. So we seem to
have here a way of seeing the world that could be described as
deontology, as consequentialism and as eudaemonianism.

> Sin is not just becoming conscious of one limitations, but a feeling of
> guilt because one thinks of oneself as being responsible for them. 

Again, I think you are seeing this in too narrow a way. As you know, the
Greek word translated as "sin" means "missing the mark" or "failing to
reach the goal." In many discussions of sin, there is no call for guilt
at all. There is only a call for recognition that one has failed in some
way and that one can succeed by following some other way of acting. It
can be as straightforward as recognizing that something needs to be
changed if one is to succeed.

Incidentally, the Sanskrit word that is usually translated as "sin" does
not mean "missing the mark". It means "damage". So when one acts
incompetently, one causes damage. If one becomes aware of the damage and
wishes not to do damage, then one makes adjustments in one's way of
doing things. 

In neither of these views of sin is there any requirement to feel guilt.
Well, it's not quite that simple. Some psychologists (such as Jame
Hollis in his book Swamplands of the Soul) distinguish between healthy
guilt and neurotic guilt. Healthy guilt is just acknowledging that one
has made a mistake and then resolving to find a way to avoid the same
mistake in the future. A person who does not have *that* kind of kind may
be a psychotic. But distinguished from healthy guilt is neurotic guilt,
which is a feeling of deep-seated inadequacy and unworthiness that won't
go away even if one changes one's conduct.

> I'm not a fan of Kierkegaard in this.

From what I have read of Kierkegaard, he had completely mastered the art
of cultivating neurotic guilt. But there are much more healthy ways of
looking at sin (whether the Greek, the Christian or the Buddhist
variety) than Kierkegaard's.

> And I've seen a lot of churchcommunities and sects who bury themselves
> in sin and certainly are not very conscious of their relatedness with
> others.

If they feel any sense of sin at all, they are at least aware of their
relationship with God. Now that doesn't count for much to a dogmatic
atheist. As a humanist, I would prefer that people have a sense of
relatedness to other people and to the environment than to God. But my
point is that having a sense of being related to God is already a very
big step away from Narcissism. Well, that depends on what kind of
Narcissism we are talking about. Freud's notion of Narcissism was a
state of complete self-absorption in which one sees oneself as the only
being in the universe who counts for anything. Jung saw Narcissism as an
intense sort of self-reflection that is actually the beginning point of
the healing process whereby one becomes integrated. So even "narcissism"
is not a word we can throw around without making it clear in which sense
we are using it.

> As I said, I don't know much about Buddhism in America, but here in
> Spain, Buddhism is something quite individualist. In addition to that,
> many  Buddhists  don't understand why they should contribute with some
> money  to  their  temple, since "Buddhism should be for free."

Yes, I have heard that many times. I usually suggest that if they want a
free temple, they should go to the park and listen to the birds. In
fact, I have started to follow my own advice. Haven't been to a temple
or Dharma center for about three years. Or maybe more like five. Or
eight. I forget.

> another example, I don't know the sources, is of a great buddhist
> teacher who, as you would expect, was vegetarian and didn't kill. 
> Yet, when his mother was dying and requested a meal of fish to be her
> last, he happily went to the market to bring her the fish.
> 
> With stories like that, it's hard to come up with a set of rules to
> express such an ethical system. Especially, a set of rules that makes
> sense to Western culture.

Coming up with absolute and invariable rules would be hard. And it
should be. Absolute and invariable rules are pretty much useless in a
conditioned and complex world. But one can usually find some underlying
principle underlying apparent contradictions in particular precepts. One
principle that is stated often enough is "avoid harm and do what is
beneficial," and that accounts remains pretty much intact everywhere you
look in Buddhist teachings. The details of what is harmful and what is
beneficial can never be fully spelled out, probably because nothing is
ever absolutely harmful to everyone or absolutely beneficial for
everyone. That is what makes life so difficult to master.

One of my favorite examples of the inherent ambiguity of the benefit of
actions is the story of the bodhisattva feeding himself to a tigress.
Every Buddhist knows that story and gets all misty eyed about it. But
not many people reflect on the whole story. After the tigress gobbles up
the bodhisattva, his parents come around and find his bones and throw
themselves on the ground wailing and sobbing and tearing out their hair.
What saves a tigress's life devastates the bodhisattva's mother. What
action of kindness is not like that? When we focus only on the good
results of our kindness and fail to see the hell our good intention
inadvertently causes for others, then we live in denial. And living in
forgetfulness is never recommended very highly by any Buddhist.

> And there's nothing wrong comparing Buddhist ethics with other kinds,
> or investigating certain ethical question within Buddhist ethics.

I agree wholeheartedly and would even go further. I think that Buddhist
ethical theory has been significantly enriched by contact with European
philosophical traditions. I think we now have a much better Buddhism
than we had one hundred years ago. In fact, I think we now have a much
better Buddhism than they had while the Buddha was alive. Why? Because
the first generations of Buddhists had only the benefit of one wise man,
and Buddhist nowadays have the benefit not only of that but also the
benefit of a hundred or so generations of very thoughtful and wise
interpreters from every part of the world. 

Lest I be accused of Occidentalism, let me add that I believe European
and American thought have also been enriched by contact with Buddhist,
Hindu, Daoist and Confucian reflections on what it means to live one's
life well and to do in peace.

> The question whether we are sinners or not is to me just pure narcissim, 
> certainly in the light of the anaatmavaada.

First of all, I don't think anaatmavaada sheds much light these days. It
is much too simplistic to be of use to use today. As for narcissism, it
shows such a level of self-preoccupation that one in its thralldom
cannot even reflect on sinfulness. Thinking of sin is the first step out
of total self-absorption and into relatedness with others. Do not
disparage that important step, even if you believe (as most mature
people do) that one should, if at all possible, evolve out of a childish
and adolescent concern with sin and into a fully mature concern with
cultivating virtue and eliminating sin, and out of that into something
rather like what Nietzsche describes in Beyond Good and Evil. 

> Yes, what I should have said is that one should at least be open to the
> possibilty that rebirth is a fact (in the sense that Richard Hayes is a fact).

I don't have much use for the idea of facts. The Pragmatists got to me
when I was still at an impressionable age, and they pretty much purged
me of the concepts of truth and facts. My tendency is to think that
Richard Hayes is a construct that comes in handy for certain specified
purposes in some contexts. I have yet to find a purpose of the construct
of rebirth, but if it ever seems to me that it would come in handy, I'll
not hesitate to avail myself of it.

>> No, the only reasonable stance is to say, along with Batchelor, "I don't
>> know. The question cannot be answered." People believe as they do
>> because of wishful thinking. That is equally true of people on both
>> sides of the question.
>
> 'I don't know', I agree with.  But going further and saying: 'The question
> cannot be answered', is to make a knowledge claim that is beyond one's ken.

Usually when I say that something can't be answered, it's a lazy way of
saying that it can't be determined given the present state of evidence.
In the case of rebirth, the situation is a little more dire than that.
In the case of rebirth there is not even much agreement on what kind of
thing would count as evidence either for it or against it. When
different teams of investigators examine claims of memories of past
lives, for example, there is very little agreement as to which cases
'pass the test' and which do not. Outfits such as Committee for
Scientific Investigation of Claims Of the Paranormal (CSICOP) dismiss
all kinds of evidence that other investigators find compelling. So what
seems to be working here, more than anything else, is prejudice. As far
as I can see, the prejudice is pretty evenly distributed among those who
see evidence for rebirth and those who see none. Myself, I see no way at
all of deciding the issue, nor do I have any idea how one would go about it.

> Batchelor is very interesting and even illuminating at times, but I
> also think at times he talks unreflective dogmatic crap.

Probably so. I have never encountered anything in his writings that
struck me that way, but I have never known anyone who does not at times
talk unreflective dogmatic crap. Few of us human beings are consistently
at our very best, not even our friend Stephen.

> I'm deeply suspicious of those who cannot, in debate, try and defend a
> view contrary to their own.

How about of us lazy slobs who don't really have a view of our own to
which anyone else's view is contrary?

> A few years ago I was asked to leave a certain Buddhist community (it
> was supposed to be a 'study' community) because of this very thing
> (probably among other things).  Nothing more contradictory than
> 'dogmatic' Buddhists!

Buddhists, I find come in two flavours: dogmatic and catatonic. The
dogmatic ones fight like canines, while the catatonic ones curl up on
meditation cushions and grin like Cheshire felines. Those of us who
learn to wriggle like eels come to be considered non-Buddhists by both
the dogs and the cats. But who would want to be a Buddhist by their
standards anyway, eh?

Well, Ocean-minded one, we must get together one of these days and
disagree with one another to see whether kindness can defeat an ocean in
pointless debate.

> This line suggests the stir caused by the Aum Shinrikyo death cult in
> Japan calling themselves Buddhist.

One of the very first discussions on BUDDHA-L was whether Elizabeth
Claire Prophet, who claimed to channel messages from the Buddha and
therefore to be a Buddhist, is entitled to call herself a Buddhist. A
lot of people tried to find reasons to say she is not really a Buddhist
at all, but I kept pointing out that every criterion they could think of
to disqualify her would also disqualify all of Mahayana and Vajrayana,
and no small amount of Theravada.

Hell's bells, if the Lotus Sutra is a Buddhist text and if Nichiren was
a Buddhist, then all I can say is "Welcome aboard, Aum Shinrikyo!
Welcome to the jolly ship of fools!" (I still draw the line at
Republicans, however. If they think they are Buddhists, the only word
for that belief is spelled d-e-l-u-s-i-o-n.)

>   One pretty well-known caricature of postmodernism asserts that there
>can be no such things as facts. Truth is always conditioned by different
>perspectives, voices, political motives, etc.

That is not only a caricature. It echoes the words of Nietzsche, whose
thoughts on this topic bear remarkable resemblace to my favorite passages in
the Sutta-nipaata and to the spirit of Nagarjuna's works. Mr Nietzsche 
spake thus:

begin{quote}
 Take care, philosophers and friends, of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom!
 Of suffering "for the truth's sake"! Even of defending yourselves! It spoils
 all the innocence and fine neutrality of your conscience; it makes you
 headstrong against objections and red rags; it stupefies, animalizes and
 brutalizes when in the struggle with danger, slander, suspicion, expulsion,
 and even worse consequences of hostility, you have to pose as protectors of
 truth upon earth--as though "the truth" were such an innocuous and
 incompetent creature as to require protectors! (Beyond Good and Evil, section 25)
end{quote}

> So surely the rational position is to be open to the
> FACT that there just might be some sort of continuity of our santaana after
> the demise of this carcass.

That "there just might be" something is not a FACT at all. It is a
possibility. I am perfectly open to the possibility that there is life
after death. I just don't find it a very interesting possibility. And I
suppose my hope is that there will not be, but if that hope does not
come true, I am quite sure I'll be capable of dealing with it with
equanimity. I have no emotional investment in this question.

Having said that, I am quite sure there will be some sort of continuity
of my santaana. My ample body will feed many worms and a few rodents. My
personality will continue to influence people who knew me when I was
still alive. My influence on people who knew me will not perish the
moment I take my last breath. That is true of all of us.

> When I have students who feel very strongly
> about the fact that there can be nothing that continues after death, I ask
> them where their conviction about the unprovable rests - certainly not in
> their reason!

No, the only reasonable stance is to say, along with Batchelor, "I don't
know. The question cannot be answered." People believe as they do
because of wishful thinking. That is equally true of people on both
sides of the question.

> The problems begin when we, perhaps unaccustomed to chilies, start saying
> things like
> 'The guy working in the kitchen is more Mexican than he is a chef'. It makes
> perfect sense to distinguish between Indian and Tibetan or Chinese food, but
> not between 'food' on the one hand and 'Mexican food' on the other. And in
> discussions about Buddhism one sees the second kind of distinctions quite a
> lot (e.g. 'Mexican Buddhists are more Mexican than Buddhist').

I now see your concern. Somehow it doesn't bother me very much when
someone says something like 'Mexican Buddhists are more Mexican than
Buddhist.' Of course such statements have to be taken with a grain of
salt, since there is no method that I know of by which we can measure
Mexicanity and Buddhisticity. If one cannot measure the Mexicanity and
the Buddhisticity in a person, then one has no basis on which to say
that her Mexican content outweighs her Buddhist content. Still, to say
'Mexican Buddhists are more Mexican than Buddhists' does convey a
subjective impression, which amounts to saying something like this: 'I
see much more resemblance between Mexican Buddhists, Mexican Catholics
and Mexican Jews than I see between Mexican Buddhists and Cambodian
Buddhists, Mexican Catholics and German Catholics and Mexican Jews and
Polish Jews.

> But I still think it can be meaningful to talk about what is' plain
> Buddhism' - and what is not.

I am not sure about that. It seems to me that Buddhism, like ice cream,
always comes in flavours. There is no such thing as 'just plain ice
cream'. Similarly, I doubt there is such a thing as just plain 
Buddhism.

> (Btw, Ian Hacking's book on 'all this bullshit we have been slinging on this
> topic' has been required reading at our philosophy of science courses for
> some time now. It's quite popular.)

Hacking is quite an intelligent author, for a Canadian. His book
Rewriting the Soul is one of my personal favourites. I love his ability
to look at a topic from many angles without prejudice while at the same
time acknowledging that his own intellectual conditioning predisposes
him to be prejudiced in certain ways. I would love to have his
intellectual integrity, but I am too lazy as a result of living in a
warm climate.

> Faith impacts actual rebirth and rebirth speculation.  Superstition is
> not a fair way to characterize rebirth because superstition connotes
> sacrificing virgins at the mouth of volcanoes to assuage angry Gods,  not
> washing your socks before a baseball game, or skipping the 13th floor in a
> sky scraper.

Yes, I would put rebirth in the same general category as those things
you mentioned. It is an antiquated belief for which there is no longer
any warrant. As I am sure you know, the Latin word "superstitio" was
used with reference to a belief or custom from the past that had
outlived its usefulness, sort of like an old professor who refuses to
retire. It is in that sense that I regard rebirth as a superstition. It
is an idea from the past that is no longer of much use and for which we
no longer have a reason to believe.

Let me say this more carefully. It would be a superstition for ME to
believe in rebirth, given what I know about neurophysiology. For someone
who has less knowledge of the topic, there is an excuse for believing
things that for me are no longer possible.

> , yet Gotamma Buddha also spoke out in support of the rebirth
> in countless passages from both traditions.

Gotama lived 2500 years ago. He also thought the earth was made up of
continents arranged as concentric circles Jambudviipa, at the center of
which was Mount Meru. He also believed in tree spirits, ogres, vampires
and luminescent gods. Are we obliged to believe everything he believed?
Must we always be as ignorant as he was?

> As Buddhism spreads to the Capitalist and Democratic West, many Buddhists
> don't accept the rebirth doctrine.

It has nothing to do with capitalism or democracy. As Buddhism moves
into cultures that have a knowledge of human physiology better than
Gotama's, Buddhist find other ways of talking about the values that
Gotama held important and that we still benefit from today. We get very
little benefit from the doctrine of rebirth. We get a great deal of
benefit from the practice of vipassanaa and mettaa-bhaavanaa, and from
the insight that suffering attends those who become attached to material
possessions, families, countries, ideologies and antiquated dogmas.

> Some create their own version of Buddhism based on  member
> consensus.  If enough members vote out rebirth there is no rebirth.

Buddhism has never been a creedal religion. No one much cares what you
believe. There are no heresies, because there is no orthodoxy. Of
course, all this could change in the West. We seem to love creeds, and
we seem to love to marginalize people who fail to believe the "right"
thing.

> I don't seek to win an argument over this issue.  Having different
> viewpoints is normal.  My purpose is to show the connection between rebirth
> and faith.

There is more to faith than stubbornness, my friend. Faith is a virtue.
Even I admit that, even though I admit I have almost none of that virtue
myself. But stubbornness is a vice, as I know from having a great deal
of it.

> The Buddha  stated  the he recalled his previous lives. Are you suggesting
> that he was a liar?

One need not be a liar to misinterpret one's experiences. False memory
syndrome is a very well-documented phenomenon. It would not be
outrageous to think that Gotama tried to make sense of his life by
appealing to the interpretive framework of his times. But we are not
obliged to make sense of his life in exactly the way he did.

>    There  is also a different approach. If one thought in rebirth as a
> story  that  gives  meaning  and  shapes  reality,  and one liked that
> reality that is also shaped by many other stories, he could believe in
> current  neurophysiology  as  the ultime source of knowledge and still
> believing in rebirth as a source of meaning.

Yes. This is what I have argued for at least twenty years. If the
rebirth story helps someone make sense of her life, then she should use
the rebirth story to make sense of her life. For those of us to whom the
rebirth story is meaningless or worse, there is no reason for us to try
to believe in what for us would only be an affectation or a
superstition.

> So  I  think  that  your argument that you can't believe in rebirth
> because  you  know something about neurophysiology is neither true nor
> valid.

Validity does not enter into the picture, because I am not advancing an
argument for or against anything. I am simply offering an account of
what is possible for me to believe. It is a true account of why I
personally cannot believe in rebirth. I cannot make it fit within my
interpretive framework. Moreover, I have far more important things to do
with my life than to try to believe something that has no meaning for
me. I am, and always have been, perfectly content to let anyone (except
Republicans) believe whatever gives them peace of mind.

> And   given  that  I  also  know  something  about neurophysiology
> and  I  can believe in rebirth, I would tend to think that  your
> neurophysiology knowledge is not what impede you to belive
> in rebirth.

The fact is that even if I knew nothing about neurophysiology, I would
not feel any inclination to believe in rebirth. I have no need for that
particular belief. What I have learned of physiology simply gives me
confidence that I am not being unreasonable in seeing the world as a
place in which no personal rebirth takes place. Of course, patterns of
human behavior repeat themselves. Dharmas recur. If you want to call
that rebirth, then I have no objection. All I would be inclined to
reject is the popular conception of it, as when someone says "I was a
Bolivian cowboy in my last life," or "The fourteenth Dalai Lama is the
rebirth of the thirteenth Dalai Lama." Notions of rebirth like that
reveal a complete misunderstanding of the doctrine of anaatman, which to
me is the most important teaching in Buddhism.

>    Btw,  can science to deny rebirth? The philosophy of science that I
> have  studied  says  that  it can't. I would appreciate an alternative
> reading here.

Science deals only in hypotheses that can be tested. As far as I know,
there is no way to test the hypothesis of rebirth. Moreover, no other
scientific observation requires the rebirth hypothesis to make sense of
what we observe. So I think we get into trouble when we try to think of
the doctrine of rebirth as scientific in any way at all. So I would not
be so foolish as to claim that science disproves an essentially
non-scientific dogma. 

> When I first heard the word 'metanarrative'  applied to the teachings of
> Buddha, it triggered an adverse reaction in me. Was it just me, or could
> there be something amiss here?

Like you, I have little use for such neologisms as "metanarrative". The
word conveys no meaning to me at all. A word that I do like, although
many I know hate it, is borrowed from the French. The word is
"problematic" used as a noun. A problematic is the combination of the
perception of a problem and a proposed solution. Scholars of comparative
religion often write about how different religions have different
problematics.

Just to give an example, the problematic of the religion of the ancient
Hebrews could be described by saying that the perceived problem is "how
do I fulfill the special obligations that I have as a member of the
tribe that is chosen by God to bring light to all nations?" The solution
to that problem is following the commands of the Torah. The problematic
of modern post-holocaust Judaism is, some would say, quite different.
According to Fackenheim, for example, the problem is "How do I ensure
that the tribe to which I was born is not exterminated by its enemies?"
(My good friend Rabbi Barry Levi thus says that for many modern Jews,
the holocaust has replaced God as the central preoccupation, as the
survival of the secular state of Israel has replaced the Torah as that
which must be protected at all costs. This is another way of saying
that not all Jews have the same problematic.)

One could say, as Benito has done, that the problematic of early
Buddhism was "How do I stop being reborn at all?" while the problematic
of early Mahayana was "How do I make sure I am reborn as a bodhisattva
so that I can serve all sentient beings?" and the problematic of Shin
Buddhism is "How do I manifest my gratitude at having been saved without
earning my salvation through my own merits?" and the problematic of some
forms of Zen is "How do I manifest my inherent Buddha nature?"

One of the nice things about this talk of problematics (which come close
to Benito's metanarratives) is that it helps us see that not everyone is
trying to solve the same problem. Jewish observance of the commandments
of the Torah might be an excellent solution to the defining problem of
the ancient Hebrews, but it would be a relatively clumsy solution to the
problem of how to avoid any further rebirths. And being a celibate monk
with only a robe and a begging bowl might be an excellent way of gaining
the detachment necessary to stop being reborn, but it would be a
terrible solution to the problem of ensuring the continued existence of
one's tribe.

Religious pluralism can be seen as a recognition that not everyone does
have, or needs to have, the same perception about what the main problem
is. So a Jew, a Muslim, a Christian, a Hindu, a Sikh, a Buddhist, and a
Humanist might have very different notions about what the basic problem
is that requires a solution, and that is quite acceptable. We can
liberate ourselves from the hideous lie involved in saying such things
as "All religions are one" or "There are many paths to the same summit"
or "God speaks to each of us in different ways."

> It seemed like an attempt to encapsulate the Buddha,  Buddhist teachings
> and Buddhist practitioners into a category - a bubble pack or a label on
> a bottle.

There is nothing wrong with that. Buddhists of various kinds tend to
present Buddhism as a rather particular problem to a specific problem.
If the problem so identified is your main problem, and if you like the
solution, then you are a Buddhist. In being a Buddhist, however, there
is no reason why one should have to believe that Buddhism is the best
solution to ALL problems. It could be that your resistance to
encapsulating the Buddha and Buddhist teachings into a specific
problematic is that you are prone to clinging to the idea (a false idea,
I am tempted to say) that the Buddha is infinite and Buddha-dharma is a
panacea, a single solution to every possible problem in life.

> Well, considering metanarratives of application, Buddhism's metanarrative is
> universalist while Judaism's is exclusivist.

Yes and no. There is an interesting item on Judaism in Philip Zaleski's
Best American spiritual writing 2004. In the article a
Jewish writer makes the claim that the essence of Judaism is making
distinctions and in keeping separate. Many Jewish observances, he
claims, have as their sole function to remind Jews that they are not
gentiles. As Jews they have special mitzvot that no other human beings
have. So this part is exclusivist. And yet the purpose for retaining
this separation is to benefit the entire world. An Orthodox Jewish
friend of mine once explained to me that his keeping kosher brings peace
to the whole universe, because God will smile on the world if and only
if Jews observe their special mitzvot, while my keeping kosher would
just be a silly affectation. Seen in this way, maintaining the laws that
separate Jew from Gentile are not much different than following a monk
following vinaya rules for the benefit of the whole world. One can
hardly say that one is more or less universalist than the other.

>  Thus Judaism serves it's own devotees while defining its membership
> in exclusive terms.

And yet there has always been a sense that the world is being healed by
the Jew's observances. So this is not seen as serving only its own
devotees. (Incidentally, "devotee" is an odd word to apply to an
observant Jew, I think. Perhaps I'm wrong.)

> Historically, Buddhism did make efforts to _invite_ non-adherents to
> consider its way or dharma, and so it spread throughout southern and eastern
> Asia via conversion, although it was rarely imposed from above (the Tokugawa
> regime exception is the case that comes to mind here); Judaism does not make
> such efforts.

There have been times in Jewish history when conversion was very widely
practiced. How else can we explain all those blue-eyed sandy-haired
Ashkenazis? Even in biblical times, there were ways of admitting
non-Jews into the tribe.

> Birth from a Jewish mother is the traditional admitting criterion there.

According to an authority on the topic of conversion in Judaism whom
Judy and I heard lecture in Jerusalem, this tradition you cite has been
followed in varying degrees through history. At some times (and for a
very few people now) birth is really the only way to become Jewish. (So
Buddhists and Hindus can easily become Jewish by dying and being
reborn.) But at many times conventional conversion based on conviction
has been strongly supported. Again the best evidence of this is the
large number of European Jews, almost none of whom are genetic members
of the tribe.

>    So,  when  a  Buddhist,  for example, disbelieves in rebirth, he is
> disbelieving  in the Indian metanarrative. The reason why I say that a
> Tibetan  Buddhist  is  more  Tibetan  than Buddhist is that he uses to
> adapt Buddhism to a different type A metanarrative, the Tibetan one.

Similarly, if Western Buddhists take the time to study the history of
Western thought, they will find that nearly all their preferences in
Buddhist thoughts and practices are replaying the major themes in
European and (to a much lesser extent) American intellectual and
religious history. All the centuries of anti-Jewish Christian dogmatics,
and equally anti-Christian Jewish dogmatics, and anti-religious humanist
dogmatics, and anti-scientific religious dogmatics have found their way
into the ways we Westerners think about Buddhism. We can't help it. For
a European or American to believe in rebirth is a betrayal of her
heritage. It's as incongruous as a Maurie singing Mozart. (I say this as
an avid Kiri Te Kanawa fan.)

There is nothing wrong with betraying one's heritage, of course. All
heritages are prisons from which it is best eventually to break free.
What amazes me about Westerners who take on the affectation of believing
in rebirth is that they step out of one prison into another. They
finally break out of the horrible shackles of Christianity or Judaism,
only to step into the chains of an equally restrictive Indian
Weltanshauung. The price of such fraud is a doubling of turmoil. It is
like being sent directly to hell without having a "Get out of hell 
free" card.

> I think that pluralism is a wonderful thing.

I don't. I think it is a very dangerous force in the modern world, for
it is precisely pluralism that is fanning the flames of fanaticism. It
has been argued by some that the whole edifice of liberalism or
pluralism rests on the fallacious view that if everyone were allowed to
express his views and live without interference, then everyone would be
happy. This is fallacious because there are some whose view is that
there is only one truth and whose practice is to try to eliminate those
who fail to see that one truth. It would probably be a mistake to let
such people go unchallenged. It would also be a mistake to challenge
them, of course. Whether one challenges them or not, they will be just
as happy to put one in an early grave.

> Come on! Do you believe all that people say to you?

When people tell me what they believe, I tend to give them the benefit
of the doubt. In other words, my default position is to believe that
they are accurately reporting their beliefs to me. Let me point out,
however, that believing that Mr. X believes proposition P is not the
same as believing proposition P.

> At least I am interested in Buddhism also because I am not anti-any
> people. Just I am against the repetition of the previous errors; the
> arising of the fanaticism, the non-sense, and more things related with
> the spreading of the non-rebirth.

Don't be so disingenuous. If you are opposed to errors, then you are
perforce opposed to the people who commit them. Errors would not exist
without people to execute them.

> I fear here I'm the only guy claiming an authentic Humanism in the
> defence of rebirth.

If it makes you feel special to think of yourself as a lone defender of
what you see as true, then you may benefit by examining some of your
psychological needs. It could be that they are causing you distress.

> Therefore, How is possible the defence of non-rebirth and claiming the
> humanist heritage at the same time?

If I might paraphrase a well-known statement by someone whose name I now
forget, "Rebirth is an hypothesis for which I have not yet found a
need." As a humanist I can account for everything that matters to me
without availing myself of the rebirth hypothesis. So it's not that I
reject it. Rather, I just don't find that I need it. If others need it,
then I am not inclined to disabuse them of it.

> are you sure?

In the present state of my conditioning, being sure of things is not one
of my needs. This could change as conditions change, of course. Nothing
is fixed in nature. If in the future I find myself requiring certainty,
I'll let you know. And at that time I will stop claiming to be a
Buddhist.

> My questions to Richard Hayes are these. Why were these lines written?

You had signed off with words to the effect that you were being pompous
and pedantic. That was followed by a signature listing your academic
degrees. I took this as a sign that you were admirably manifesting
healthy self-effacement. My only motivation was to show you that I
really appreciated your ability to make a small joke at your own
expense. One beau geste deserved another, I thought.

> How were members of our list in any way served, or the interests of Buddhist
> academic discussion in any way advanced by your writing these three
> sentences ahead of your signature?

I had no thought of serving anyone on the list except you. The service
to you was admittedly a very minor one. I quite enjoyed the playful
spirit of your message and responded in what struck me as a similarly
playful tone. We do quite a bit of playing here on buddha-l, because we
are all, in our own way, ludicrous.

> These comments didn't need to be made. Why did you make them?

I don't need to have a beard, but I have one. I don't need to have a
dog, but I have one. I don't need to teach Sanskrit, but I do. I am one
of those very rare people who does needless things, from time to time,
just for the sheer love of doing them. The Buddha (one of my favorite
characters in the Pali Canon) would no doubt have disapproved such
frivolous self-indulgence.

> I think we would all be much better served if list members, including and
> especially the list "owner", limited their comment to those Buddhist related
> issues under discussion and avoided  commenting on or toying with irrelevant
> list members' personal attributes, including names.

You may prefer some other list, one more dedicated to serving its
members well. On this list we tend more to play with one another than to
serve one another.

> I find your behavior decidedly unfriendly and adolescent-like.

Yes, I am eternally adolescent (on my more mature days), but never have
I been unfriendly to you or anyone else. Your observations get a score
of 50%. In Canada that would earn you a grade of D. In New Mexico such a
score would flunk. But I always let people who flunk take a makeup exam.
Your makeup exam is this: put on some lipstick and mascara.

> I expected better from you, Richard, and surely as list members, we
> deserve better.

Unrealistic expectations lead only to dukkha. Make adjustments in your
expectations, and your dukkha will cease.

As for the question of what readers of buddha-l deserve, I have no
opinion on that. I am content to leave it to God and bureaucrats to
decide which deserts are just.

> When you offers to "quote the Buddha", as you did, I suggest you are
> attempting to quote an artifact.

Then you are in perfect agreement with Benito, and with me. We all know
we are quoting a fictitious character in an overly long epic written by
a team of tedious authors.

> Quoting artifacts to support logical arguments is counterproductive.

It never hurts to quote any words that say well what one agrees with. 
(I can't recall who said that.) A quotation is, of course, not an 
argument. We are all adults here and understand that without needing 
to be told. But we also love to hurl quotes around as if they almost 
mattered.

> Perhaps we are doing a disservice to Buddhism by engaging it as a
> religion rather than as a literary work of Fine Art.

The Pali canon as art? God, what an insult to art! Better, I think, to
see the Pali canon as an overly long infomercial, or as a prologue to
The Lotus Sutra, a self-promotional monstrosity consisting of a text
about itself being the best Buddhist text of all.

> In an ethics of virtues nobody can tell an other what to do.

The Buddha told plenty of people what to do and what not to do.

>  There's an open situation of equality and one teaches by giving
> and example and exposing this example to open discussion. What you guys
> are doing here is turning virtues into principles ore commandments and
> that's just illogical.

It may be illogical, but it is following rather faithfully the example
set by the Buddha, who set examples but also laid down principles and
gave guidelines that come pretty close to being commandments, the
implications of which had to be worked out by a kind of reasoning very
much like jurisprudential casuistry.

> He advised them, encouraged or inspired them. He afaik never said  
> someone was a bad person because he didn't obey commands.

No, he just kicked them out of the community if he felt they were
unworthy of being monks.

>> It all depends on what we would like to call Buddhism. I think that
>> pre-Western  Buddhism  can  hardly  be  explained  without the rebirth
>> doctrine.
>
> Pre-western? I love it! 25 centuries of thought dismissed in a single
> phrase 

What on earth does pre-Western mean? Are we talking about a time when
the planet earth was lacking the western hemisphere? Is it supposed that
Buddhism came into being before this hypothetical half-planet acquired
Europe and the Americas? That seems a decidedly Asiocentric view of
geography.

As a matter of fact, quite a lot of Asian Buddhism pretty much ignored
the doctrine of rebirth. It was not a big feature in Japanese Buddhism.
It wasn't denied. It just wasn't considered very important. I think it
might be possible to spend a few decades in a Japanese Zen monastery
without hearing a word on the topic of rebirth, and yet you'd hear
plenty about ethics. And even more about tofu.

> Dale S. Wright, "Critical Questions Towards a Naturalized Concept of
> Karma in Buddhism", Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 11, 2004,
> concludes:
>
> "Although at the time when Buddhism first emerged, karma and rebirth
> continued to be linked together in order to make the newly emerging
> domain of ethics viable, today, ironically, given the cultural evolution
> of ethical understanding, karma may need to be disconnected from the
> metaphysics of rebirth in order to continue the development of Buddhist
> ethics."

I think it is useful to recall the concern that Sigmund Freud raised in
 Future of an Illusion. His worry was that if ethics is
linked to any dogma (such as the existence of God or heaven and hell)
that people begin to doubt, they may also begin to doubt the very idea
of ethics. This specter of moral nihilism is very real, but it can
easily be dismissed by breaking the link between ethical theory and a
metaphysical dogma that the rational mind is likely to regard as
unwarranted by evidence and reason. Rebirth, understood as the notion
that a sentient being's mentality is the continuation of the mentality
of some other deceased sentient being, is a good candidate for being
regarded as unwarranted. But even a rational mind that easily dismisses
rebirth can find plenty of good reasons to be ethical. Not every ethical
norm stands on the flimsy foundation of unsustainable religious dogma.
So I'm inclined to think that Wright is right.

> Like Benito, I'm not sure I buy the argument that Asian Buddhism largely
> ignores rebirth.

I don't think that was the claim. The claim was that East Asian Buddhism
in general, and Japanese Buddhism in particular, largely ignores
rebirth. This was not my idea. I read it many years ago in the writing
of a Japanese scholar of Buddhist history; I'm sorry I cannot now recall
where I read it. The argument was speculative in nature, but the main
idea was that something like 90% of Buddhists in Japan follow Pure Land
or Zen. What made these specific forms of Buddhism so attractive to the
Japanese, the argument goes, is that both do a kind of end-run around
the doctrine of rebirth. Zen does so by placing a huge emphasis on
enlightenment in this very body. Moreover, there are numerous stories of
Zen masters taking a stance very much like Stephen Batchelor's when
asked about rebirth; they simply say "I don't know about what happens
after death, because I'm still alive. Ask me after I die." And Pure Land
does an end-run around rebirth by claiming that everyone who has
sufficient sincerity becomes a Buddha in the next life and so never
returns to this or any other realm within the Sahaloka. The claim was
made that the Japanese people felt very uneasy about the doctrine of
repeated rebirths, because it conflicted too much with their indigenous
folklore about death.

I have, incidentally, seen similar arguments made about the Chinese, who
reportedly found it difficult to balance the doctrine of multiple
rebirths with their indigenous lore about life after death. If you try
to infer what Chinese Buddhists believe from how they act when people
die, it is not easy to arrive at a conclusion. If they believe an
ancestor has been reborn as a cockroach or a used Toyota salesman in
Kansas, then why do they burn money for several decades so that their
ancestors in heaven will have plenty to spend? One way of resolving this
apparent conflict is to say that Chinese Buddhists *believe* what their
actions indicate, namely, that people go to heaven when they die, but
they honor Buddhist tradition by repeating what Buddhist tradition says,
namely, that there is rebirth. This is not so far-fetched. Just about
every culture in the world is conceptually conservative and continue
talking in ways that do not reflect what they actually believe. In
English, for example, we still say that the sun sets, even when we
believe the earth turns. And even materialists who believe that there is
no afterlife at all speak of people passing on.

Like Bertrand Russell, I am inclined to say that when you have to make
an estimate of what someone believes, listen not to what they say, but
instead watch carefully what they do.

> if you examine the Buddhist ethics of compassion and nonviolence, 
> it does seem to depend in the assumption of rebirth. Otherwise,
> why would killing be unethical?

The argument that is often given in Indian Buddhist texts is quite
simple. Other beings show signs that they do not wish to die. They run
away when they are threatened with harm or death. If another wishes not
to die, then killing them requires imposing one's own will over theirs.
But imposing one's will on another is a form of attachment to self. And
attachment to self is the fundamental cause of dukkha. So if one wishes
to avoid dukkha, the best thing one can do is to learn not to impose
one's will on others. Arguments along these lines are given by such
fellows as Shantideva without any reference at all to rebirth.

>  Death of any kind would amount to exiting from the wheel of
> suffering, and that's not a bad thing, right?

It's not a good thing unless the person doing the exiting regards it as
a good thing. A similar observation can be made about theft. Ultimately,
the Buddhist position is that any kind of ownership is a fundamental
delusion. No one in reality owns anything. The very idea of owning
something is a manifestation of confusion. And yet, people act as if
they believe they own things. So a Buddhist should honor what people
think, while perhaps also resolving to help them think more clearly. If
someone thinks he owns a cow, then don't take the cow away from him.
Why? Because taking what is not given is imposing one's will on another,
and this ends up being a source of dukkha both to oneself and to others.

> Are you suggesting that ultimately the Buddhist position is that in
> reality there are no dependent arisings?

I certainly was not consciously thinking that, nor can I see how it
would follow from what I was consciously saying.

There is an interesting discussion of motivation in Dharmakiirti. He
says that anyone can cultivate positive virtues such as friendship and
compassion. All that is required is seeing specific instances of pain.
When one sees any pain anywhere, one associates that pain with instances
of pain one has seen before, and one recalls that part of what it is to
be in pain is to wish for the pain to stop. So if one sees pain, one
knows that it would be good to bring it to an end. Acting to bring it to
an end is compassion.

Compassion, says Dharmakiirti, can be cultivated even in the minds of
people who are deluded. A deluded person might think "Tom is a person.
He's a friend of mine. I hate to see him in pain. So I'm going to help
him out." A person who is not deluded, on the other hand, would not
think that Tom is a person. The deluded person would think "There is
some pain. May its causes be eradicated so that the pain will end." The
deluded person thinks in personal terms, while the non-deluded person
thinks in purely impersonal terms. The deluded mind may even think in
self-interested terms. It might think "I'll help Tom out, so that one
day if I'm in a jam, he'll help me out." The non-deluded mind will 
think: "There is pain. It should be eliminated."

How does the deluded person's compassion differ from the non-deluded
person's compassion? Because the deluded person is compassionate because
he believes it may serve his personal interests, if he stops believing
it is in his interest to respond to another's pain, then he will stop
being compassionate. The non-deluded person, on the other hand, will
never fail to be compassionate, because his compassion is based on
nothing but an appreciation that pain hurts and hurting is by its very
nature something to eliminate if possible.

What is interesting about Dharmakiirti's discussion of noble virtues,
which are at the heart of Buddhist ethics, there is no mention
whatsoever of rebirth. His way of thinking about ethics became the basis
for how just about everyone who came after him thought about ethics. So
talking about ethics without any reference at all to rebirth has been
the norm for about 1500 years. To say that people will be ethical only
if they believe in rebirth (or some other kind of afterlife) is a giant
leap backwards. It is abandoning Buddhist tradition.

Bhikkhu Buddhadasa argues that the very idea of rebirth is impossible if
one understands the implications of the Buddhist doctrine of non-self.
Once a person becomes noble (which in a Buddhist context means once a
person is no longer prone to seeing events in personal terms as "I" and
"mine"), the question of past and future lives stops making any sense at
all. Rebirth, as a doctrine, becomes meaningless. But ethics never
becomes meaningless. So ethics must be independent of the doctrine of
rebirth.

I tend to agree with Dharmakiirti and Bhikkhu Buddhadasa on this matter.
So my position would be that there is dependent origination, but there
are no persons. And in the absence of persons, there is no rebirth. I
might even be willing to go as far as Buddhadasa's rather bold claim
that the doctrine of rebirth is incompatible with the teachings of
dependent origination, which is the heart of the Buddha's teaching.

On the other hand, I don't think one should be too quick to try to
convince someone who does believe in rebirth that he should give up the
belief. Once one understands dependent origination properly, the belief
in rebirth will fall away all by itself. If someone is holding onto the
belief in rebirth, it is probably because he can't swim and needs
something to hold onto to avoid drowning. Forcing someone to let go of
what they need is doing them no service at all.

> If anything, I'm the only one on this list that has
> repeatedly tried to argue that Buddhism is ideologically
> neutral.

Buddhism is itself an ideology. Dharma is nothing if not ideology. The
fact that most of us on this list subscribe to the Buddha's ideological
stance does not make it less of an ideological stance.

> This view doesn't seem to sit well with some the Marxists and
> communists on this list, for reasons I don't really understand.

Gosh, maybe I should believe in rebirth after all. It would appear
Senator McCarthy is back among us. I have no idea who all these Marxists
and communists on this list are. They have evaded my attention. Just
about everything I see on buddha-l appears to me to be motivated by
people's sincere attempts to come to a reasonable understanding of
buddha-dharma and to apply it to their lives.

Of course the fact that the Buddha himself advised people to give up all
their personal property and to join a society in which all property was
owned collectively and distributed to each according to need might make
him a little suspect in the eyes of the late senator from Wisconsin.

> If nothing else, taxation (in the US) is an example of taking
> something that is not given.  The fact that it is the state
> doing the taking does not make it any less adharma.

The state does not only take money away. It also provides services. The
monetary system itself would be impossible without a government backing
it up. So if a citizen were to accept the protection of the police and
army, an education, a system of highways, a system of weights and
measures and a number of other social amenities, then if the citizen
were not paying taxes for them, the citizen would be taking what is not
given. I take it that anyone who benefits from what society as a whole
provides implicitly agrees to pay for it somehow. To expect those things
without taxation would be a form of greed and delusion.

As a Buddhist, you probably accept the principle that the way you choose
to look at something has an effect on how contented you are. You have a
choice about how you look at things. If you choose to see taxation as a
form of robbery, you'll feel like a victim. That is dukkha. If you see
taxes as a service the government provides you in helping you practice
daana, you will be grateful for both the taxation and the things it
provides. You may also take a more active role in helping the government
spend your daana in a way you approve. I personally favor tax dollars
being put into education and health care and don't much like it when it
goes into waging pointless wars. But I also accept the fact that I
benefit from living in a democracy where decisions are reached by the
majority that I do not agree with. Accepting policies that one does not
personally like is part of the price one pays for the benefits of having
a vote at all. So I see the whole thing as an excellent example of
dharma at work.

> The only reason we resort to politics is because people lack ethics,
> concentration, and wisdom which collectively form the essence
> of Buddhism IMO; formulating public policy is not Buddhism's direct
> concern.

The Buddha was by no means aloof from politics. He reportedly gave
considerable advice to kings about how to run kingdoms according to
Dharma. I see no reason why a Buddhist should not do the same thing. If
one believes that Dharma is universal and pertains to every aspect of
life, then it also pertains to politics. Politics is about living well
in the world as a community, and the Buddha and subsequent Buddhists
have always had a great deal to say about that. If ethics and wisdom are
the essence of Buddhism at its best, then so is politics, because wisdom
and ethics are the essence of politics at its best. (Of course Buddhism
in practice, like politics in practice, falls far short of the ideal.
But that does not mean we should lower the ideal just to accommodate
actual practice.)

> Any political system, be it capitalism or even some forms
> of anarchism, can be made to work if citizens and public servants
> alike have successfully cultivated the aforementioned three special
> trainings.  That's why I think it is a mistake to think of Buddhism
> as aligned with any political ideology (left, right, anti-Bush, etc.).

The terms "left" and "right" have become almost perfectly meaningless.
But if we recall that the Buddha said that the essence of a Dharmic
kingdom is gathering taxes from the wealthy and to redistribute that
money around the citizenry so that no person is lacking the means of
earning an honest livelihood, then I think there is ground for being
critical, as a Buddhist, of governments that fail to do that. The tax
cuts of the Bush administration are immoral. The details of the budget
he has just announced are outrageous and completely contrary to to the
principles of Buddhism and Christianity. So while it is not the essence
of Buddhism to be anti-Bush, it would be a very poor Buddhist practice
that did not draw attention to the moral inadequacies of Bush's
policies.

> I seemed to have missed any sutras that deal explicity with how to run
> a Dharmic kingdom.

That is the central theme in Cakkavatti-siihanaada Sutta and the
Agga~n~naa Sutta, 26 and 27 of the Diigha-nikaaya (Longer Discourses) of
the Pali canon.

> Assuming what you say above as a starting point, however, it seems
> obvious that the essential starting point of a Dharmic kingdom is a
> Dharma king, someone who is either a Buddha or close to it.

A Dharma-raajaa is described as someone who rules by moral virtue rather
than through force. Such a person should of course have wisdom,
compassion and moral integrity. A buddha also has such virtues, but
surely ordinary (but excellent) people do also, even if to a lesser
degree than an anuttara-samyak-sambuddha.

> The cuts are not immoral in and of themselves, particularly when one
> considers that tax money is being stolen from other citizens pretty
> much at gun point by arguably the most ethically challenged strata of
> US society.

If one takes the Buddhist suttas seriously, then any tax cuts are
immoral (adharma) when they result in the underfunding of programs aimed
at enabling the poor to make an honest livelihood. When tax cuts result
in cuts in education, health programs and loans to farmers, then one can
see them as immoral (adharma). When tax cuts result in enormous public
debt, they can also be seen as adharma. Ask any fiscal conservative.

Taxation in itself is, of course, far from theft. It is more like an
institutionalized form of daana. It becomes immoral, as theft is, only
when funds are used for illegitimate purposes, such as waging
unnecessary wars. And a system of taxation becomes immoral when the
burden of taxation is unjust, such as when the extremely wealthy can get
away with paying very little or even nothing through various loopholes.

> Rather than further empower those who can lie without
> compunction to forcibly steal from the general population, I would
> rather see the federal government get out of the business of trying
> to provide cradle to grave solutions and do everything it can to
> foster an environment where organizations such as the Acumen Fund
> ( http://www.acumenfund.org ) can get started and thrive.

Nothing wrong with that, although I would readily endorse any government
in which the people elected were honest and competent. There is no
reason in principle why that could not happen. So what I would suggest,
and I think this is along the lines of what the Buddha recommends in the
suttas mentioned above, is to give the government powers to help the
weak and then to elect honest government officials who will carry out
that mandate. That is better than doing away with governmental powers
altogether out of fear of seeing that power abused by dishonest
officials who carry out a mandate of serving only the wealthy who backed
their candidacies.

> Such an organization is in a much better position to efficiently and
> creatively administer resources such that compassionate social
> engagement actually gets results rather than making things worse.

Any organization, whether it is a governmental agency, a non-profit
charity, an NGO or a think tank, is capable of being undermined by
people of low integrity. There is no reason in principle why
www.acumenfund.org is more efficient or honest than a governmental
agency. If I may wax tautological, government is a problem only when
government is a problem. But government is not necessarily a problem; in
the right hands it can be one of the most efficient ways of getting
things done. And that is why an important aspect of mindfulness practice
is striving to see that government gets into the right hands.

> Richard, I wasn't aware that the state offered the choice of availing
> or not availing.

No, there is no choice, just as there is no choice about whether one
wishes to obey laws against murder and theft. This is pretty much the
nature of laws. One may have a choice about whether one lives in a
country or leaves it, but if one chooses to live in a country, then one
accepts all the laws in place. These days, if one chooses to live on the
planet earth, there are not many countries in which there is no
taxation. I suspect this is because just about every country on earth
has learned that taxing citizens to provide the services they expect is
a good idea.

> Look, I don't think that the government of a democratic republic is
> really the equivalent of these - I exaggerate to make a point, but I
> also don't think it is quite such an innocent and just institution as
> you seem to make it out either.

Taxation in and of itself is neither inherently just nor inherently
criminal. It has no svabhaava. My only claim is that it can be just,
which is to say it is no inherently criminal or evil. I claim further
that it can be just only if citizens make it clear that they wish tax
monies to be spent on things that are wholesome and beneficial. And I
also claim that one thing that would make taxation just, according to
Buddhist conceptions of justice, is when taxation is used as a means of
raising money from the wealthy and distributing it in such a way that no
one is left in poverty or some other socially disadvantaged condition.

President Bush is waging a war against Dharma. He is fighting it on
several fronts. The ways he advocates spending money is his current
budget are nearly all adharmic. His advocacy of making tax cuts
permanent is argued on the grounds that "It's your money, not
society's," which promotes adharmic self-centered thinking rather than
dharmic communitarian thinking. And his assault on social security on
similar grounds ("If you earn money and die young, then why should you
lose the money you contributed?") also promotes selfishness. So when
people in government think like that, I agree with you that paying taxes
to such a government may be immoral. But from the fact that the Bush
government is evil and corrupt it does not follow that ALL government,
even all BIG government, is inherently evil and corrupt. This is really
the only point I have been trying to make.

>That being said, the points I have been trying to make are these:
>
>     1) taxes levied via coercion is adharma in as much as it is an
>        example of taking what is not given; again, the fact that it
>        is "the state" doing the taking does not make it any less
>        adharma

My response has been that if one agrees to live in society at all and enjoy
the benefits thereof, the one implicitly agrees to pay the costs, so
taxation is not taking what is not given at all. Rather, it is collecting a
bill for services rendered. Moreover, one can, if one chooses, see the
paying of taxes as an opportunity to give, hence a form of daana. I submit
that seeing it in that light causes less dukkha.

>     2) there is a world difference between taxes levied via coercion
>        and daana; this should be self-evident, but I can try and
>        provide an explanation if one is required

Perhaps I have been reading too much Naagaarjuna and Dharmakiirti, but I
don't regard anything as complex as the subject we are discussing as
self-evident. This is surely one of those things upon which one superimposes
one's own highly conditioned prejudices. Whether one sees taxation as theft
or as daana is subjective perception of a complex phenomenon and has nothing
whatsoever to do with evidence, let alone self-evidence.

>     3) there are far more effective ways of helping others than giving
>        money to the US government and/or further empowering it to
>        make and administer policy

This is your opinion, and I know a lot of Americans share it. I think it is
a rather short-sighted and foolish view you have expressed here, but
Americans as a whole are rather gifted at being short-sighted and foolish.
It is the backbone of our culture, I fear. And I have tried to make the case
that the common American view you have articulated is diametrically opposed
to traditional Buddhist ways of viewing government and taxation. I suppose
one could say that in this matter America is a land of no Buddha. (Say, that
would make a snappy title for a book!)

> Unlike you, I can no longer believe that this trust is
> well placed.

You distort what I have been saying, Bill. I have never said or even
implied that I think the current government is trustworthy. That the
current government is made up mostly of quacks and thugs, however, does
not lead me to conclude that government is necessarily made up of
reprehensible charlatans. I still believe in the principles on which my
home and native land was founded. In fact, I believe in them so much
that I would love to see an administration come into power that follows
those principles.

>   In other words, "the state" has already
> defaulted on it's side of this supposed social contract
> I am bound to (one that I never signed, and never would
> sign in it's present form).

Then overthrow the government. The Declaration of Independence says,
rightly I think, that one is obliged to overthrow any government that
fails to adhere to certain universally accepted principles of goodness.
Go read the document carefully. It lists the complaints the people had
against King George. I think you'll find that about half of the
disgusting things King George III was doing then are being done again by
President George III.

> Granted this is a definition of the perfection of daana,
> but I don't see how we can even practice becoming perfect
> at daana unless the act of giving is a voluntary one.

Nothing you do is voluntary unless you volunteer to do it. Where you and
I differ, I think, is that I am quite happy to pay taxes. It does
irritate me when tax money is misspent. But the remedy to that, I think,
is to turf out governments that misspend the public money. And if that
doesn't happen fast enough for you, you can always reduce the amount of
money you pay in taxes by being very generous in supporting charitable
institutions. When I was living in Canada, I hardly ever declared tax
deductions. When I live in the USA, I declare every penny I legally can.
If the government of the USA spent money as wisely as the government of
Canada does, I would happily pay much higher taxes than I now pay.

> Giving without expectation of repayment does not mean,
> however, giving without consideration of possible harmful
> ramifications for a particular act of giving.

Yes, of course. And that is why you should do everything you can to
persuade your elected representatives to spend money wisely on things of
benefit. The Prajnaparamita literature says that giving people the means
to buy weapons, to buy or trade poisons and toxins or to destroy the
happiness and well-being of others is not daana at all. I take that very
seriously. And that is why I spend a fair amount of my time letting my
elected representatives know that they will not get my support if they
continue to wage unnecessary wars (is ANY war necessary?) and pass
legislation that allows major corporations to degrade the environment.
But I am not prepared to throw out government and taxation as such. That
would be like doing away with the institution of marriage just because
some marriages go bad.

> Not everyone is made for the rigors of Sanskrit grammar or the fine
> points of scholastic philosophy.

Those talents are not necessary for careful reflection. So throw your
red herring back into the pond.

> Let's allow the painter to paint, the scholar to research, and the
> meditator to meditate rather than have people do badly what they are
> not suited for.

Everyone is suited for careful reflection and for virtue. Even
Republicans are suited for it; they just choose not to engage in it.
There is no reason why the painter, the scholar and meditator cannot
cultivate virtue and engage in careful reflection. My quibble is not
with painters, poets, sculptors, artisans, gardeners or any number of
other callings. My worry is with people, mostly intellectuals, who
denigrate their own talents and who undermine the cultivation of virtue
by saying that the distinction between virtue and vice is dualistic and
therefore somehow an obstacle to nirvana.

> Let's hope everyone cultivates virtue and a liberality of spirit that
> allows there is another path to truth than one's own.

A noble sentiment, but it is impossible to cultivate anything worthwhile
if your point of departure is non-dualism. It's a completely bankrupt
idea, the adoption of which can only impede one from attaining the
benefits of Dharma practice.

> Well Richard I'll drag up your Quantum physics e-mail

Good luck. I never wrote one. All I have ever said about quantum
mechanics is that it is an entirely different enterprise from Dharma
practice and therefore mostly irrelevant.

> and with that I will try to explain why under some circumstances it
> is important for Buddhism. I will also go into several interpretations
> of it.

About fifteen years ago I attended a lecture by a philosopher of science
whose lecture consisted of making the point that quantum mechanics is
probably the worst thing that ever happened to the humanities and the
social sciences. The basic argument was that hardly anyone who is not a
theoretical physicist grasps the principles of quantum mechanics at all.
In the absence of understanding, just about everyone who tries to talk
about quantum mechanics resorts to imagination. So what has happened is
that a lot of people in the humanities and social sciences have
succumbed to the temptation to pass off their own wild speculation as
somehow compatible with quantum physics. Implicitly they are making the
fallacious argument "Quantum physics is very weird but true, and what I
am saying is also very weird, so it must also be true."

I have been teaching Buddhism for more than thirty years now. It has not
yet been my experience that some student has come up to me and said
"Doc, I'm having a hard time understanding this Dharma stuff. If you
could just explain it to me in terms of quantum mechanics I think I
could grasp it." When a student comes to me with that request, I may
give some thought to trying to learn something about quantum mechanics.
Until then, I'll probably continue to explain Buddhism in its own terms
with occasional references to the Stoics, the Skeptics, Hume and, on
very rare occasions, a post-Kantian or two, and to various psychologists
whose basic interest was, like the Buddha's, to find ways to avoid
avoidable pain and suffering.

Some metaphors from modern technology can be very helpful. For example,
one teacher whose dharma talks I have heard (when he and I gave a
meditation workshop together) is Shinzen Young. He has very skillfully
talked about meditation in terms of experiences that just about everyone
has these days with their computers. His approach is fun and immediately
accessible to most people, but he in no way waters down the heart of
wisdom. That, to my mind, is skillful Dharma teaching.

> As for Hua-Yen and T'ien T'ai if it wasn't for these doctrines
> Buddhism would have stayed the highly exclusionary doctrine that it
> was in India.

Just offhand, what is wrong with Buddhism remaining highly exlusionary?
The Buddha himself reportedly thought that only a few people would be
willing to heed what he said. The vast majority of people, he thought,
would reject it. I'm not sure anything much can change that. Tell people
the price they will have to pay for freedom from suffering and the vast
majority will not be willing to pay that price. Of course, you can lie
to people about the price, thereby sucking more people into the delusion
that they are really going to get freedom, but the cost of this kind of
"success" is a loss of moral integrity. So I'm not sure the exclusionary
nature of the Dharma has anything to do with Indian culture, Chinese
culture or any other historical qualities. I think the Dharma just is
unpalatable to most people and probably always will be as long as the
human condition is what it is, which is to say, dominated by greed,
hatred and delusion. These three factors militate against the Dharma
ever winning a popularity contest, except perhaps among those who
completely fail to grasp its significance.

Here is where some reflection on quantum mechanics may pay off. The vast
majority of people who think they know something about quantum mechanics
are, according to all the physicists I have heard talking about it,
dealing with highly watered down and largely fanciful versions of what
physicists themselves are thinking. The principles of quantum mechanics
have not, in other words, themselves become widely known. They are still
understood only by very few people. Similarly, no matter how many people
there are who think they are applying the Dharma to their lives, only
very very few actually are. So in this respect, and this respect only,
quantum mechanics is like Dharma, namely, that the belief that they have
become accessible to the multitudes is a delusion. And delusions, I
believe, are best avoided if possible, because they tend to lead to
trouble.

> While it is a wild extrapolation to say quantum physics verifies
> hua-yen and t'ien t'ai since they are centuries ahead of anything that
> anything physics has to say

Physics is a science. It is not the purpose of a science to liberate
people from their diseased ways of thinking. Science is a completely
different enterprise from soteriology, which is what Huayan and Tiantai
deals in. So don't expect Huayan ever to give us anything of scientific
value, and don't expect quantum mechanics ever to give us anything of
soteriological value. Screwdrivers are great at driving screws. Scissors
are great at cutting paper. If one learns to use each tool for the job
for which it was designed, life will go pretty smoothly. The same can be
said of learning when to be scientific and when to be religious.

> Spoken like Edward Conze, Richard, but what I'd like to know is what is
> inclusive about the highly arcane complexities of the Mahayana in general,
> but particularly these two schools?

I agree. For me the first question is the one I asked: what is wrong
with Buddhism being accessible only to the few who are ready for it? But
the follow-up question would have been the question you are asking: even
if it is granted that Buddhism should be available to all, what in
Mahayana makes it more accessible. My impression is, apparently as yours
is, that most of Mahayana is obscurantist and far more inaccessible to
the uninitiated than canonical Buddhism had been. The Mahayana as a
whole strikes me as the product of Brahmins trying to smother the
Buddha-dharma by replacing it with a system of thought and institutions
very much like the Brahmanical systems in the rest of India. When
Mahayana migrated to China, it became even more arcane than it had been
in India, mostly because the Chinese had no idea how to render the
subtleties of Sanskrit texts into a non-Indoeuropean language.

It could be argued that the Pure Land schools are relatively open to
all, but it is not at all obvious to me that the way for them was paved
by Huayan and Tiantai. I usually think of the system developed by
Tiantai Zhiyi as a Lotus Sutra school since he regarded the Lotus
as the pinnacle of Dharma and placed Pure Land as, at best, a
propaedeutic, a stage along the way to the teachings of the Lotus. Mind
you, I very much admire Tiantai's attempt to find a place for all forms
of Buddhism and to develop a curriculum in which every school of
Buddhism would be studied in a particular sequence. But in practice this
took twenty-five years to complete and was feasible only to scholastic
monks who had nothing to do but study. It was hardly available to people
who (unlike Richard Hayes) had "real jobs" as Steven Lane claims to
have. And Huayan thought is even more abstruse and designed for the
monastic specialist. So I don't think one could say that either one of
those schools made the Buddhist accessible to the masses. Quite the
opposite. They took material that was pretty straightforward and
packaged it in a labyrinthine structure that only highly literate
scholars with a great deal of leisure time could master. If George Bush
is the anti-Christ (as many Christians claim), Tiantai might well be
considered the anti-Buddha.

Something I would find amusing, if it were not so tragic, is the love
affair that so many Westerners are having with non-dualism in such
things as Chan/Zen, Tiantai, Mahamudra and various kinds of Tantrism.
That idea has been turned into an ill-disguised contempt (hardly a
non-dualistic virtue!) for language, for intellectual work, for virtue
and for careful reflection. It's hardly surprising that the Bolsheviks
and the Fascists and the National Socialists in the 1930s were all
fascinated with Buddhist and Hindu forms of non-dualism. Nothing serves
the promotion of tyranny better than fuzzy thinking, and there is
nothing more fuzzy than the rhetoric of non-dualism. Although as a
liberal I am completely opposed to censorship, if I were inclined to
consign books to the flames, about eighty-five percent of the Mahayana
corpus would be my kindling of choice.

> This sort  of "look for your mind" practice has a long pedigree in
> Buddhism so I'm surprised to see you condemn it.

Warfare, theft, exploitation, rape and incest have a long pedigree in
the human race, but this alone does not recommend them. Being the owner
of a dog of mixed caste, I am not impressed much by pedigrees. I am more
impressed by results. The "look for your mind" practice yielded no
results when I tried it, whereas vipassanaa and mettaa-bhaavanaa have
yielded enormously positive results. (Just look at how compassionate and
equanimous I am toward all the hopeless idiots with whom I disagree.)

>  But I'm probably making too much of one of your rhetorical flourishes.

Making inane rhetorical flourishes comes from reading too many Mahayana
sutras. And too much Dharmakirti.

> The pithy line you reference here is Suzuki's translation of a
> passage in the Lankaavataarasuutra. Unfortunately, it's a bad
> translation.

This raises an interesting issue. About ten years ago I had occasion to
read quite a bit of the Condescension into Lanka with a graduate
student, and we failed to discover a single passage in Suzuki's
translation that was a faithful rendering of the Sanskrit. From the
point of view of grammatical and philosophical accuracy, his translation
is a disaster. But the part I find interesting is that I actually like
his translation more than I like the original text. Suzuki's rendering,
though wildly inaccurate, is much more thought-provoking and inspiring
to me than the Sanskrit.

Jay Garfield says in the introduction of his translation of
Naagaarjuna's MMK that it's quite possible that the dGe-lugs scholastics
may well have understood Naagaarjuna better than Naagaarjuna understood
himself, and he quotes Wilfrid Sellers's observation that surely we
understand Plato better than Plato understood himself, because Plato did
not have the benefit of more than two millennia of the best minds in the
world reflecting on the implications of his words. Perhaps the same can
be said of Suzuki's translation of the Pratfall into Lanka. It could
just be that his translation, which is informed by several hundreds of
years of Chan and Zen ruminations on the text, is, generally speaking,
an improvement on the Sanskrit original.

> Not that anyone on this list is really interested in this, but I thought
> I would respond to Richard's comment anyway.

Thank you for your helpful response. The more I see of quantum physics,
the more it seems a fascinating realm of inquiry that has no relevance
whatsoever to the concerns of Buddhism.

Something that I find interesting is that some Buddhists seem to be
eager to find rough and vague similarities between scientific findings
and traditional Buddhist dogmas. I can only guess why this may be. The
guess I make most often is that these Buddhists feel somewhat insecure
in their convictions and therefore need to reassure themselves that
Buddhist is not likely to be challenged by scientific research in the
ways that literalistic interpretations of Christianity may be
challenged. It strikes me as a subtle kind of triumphalism, as if one
were saying "my religion is more scientific than yours."

What makes the teachings of Buddhism useful constructs, it seems to me,
is their perceived utility in facilitating happiness and well-being
among human beings. (I say "perceived utility" because I am convinced
that there is no way of testing the truth of the claim that Buddhist
teachings promote human happiness and well-being. It is in no way a
scientific claim but a statement of faith.)

> The universe certainly does seem ridiculous, which is perhaps why so many
> of us seek sensible answers: in the mistaken belief that things *ought* to
> make sense. The belief that things ought to make sense is a difficult one
> to shake.

It could even be said that liberation consists in being free from the
compulsive urge to try to make sense of things. This, I think, is at
least part of what Nagarjuna was trying to tell us.

> Although I agree with the caveat on mixing science and religion, I can see
> how tempting it is to try to do so - because we privelege
> scientific 'knowledge' (hard facts), and we want to shore up our faith, we
> latch onto superficial similarities that seem to reinforce the superiority
> of our views.

A couple of years ago I heard an interesting lecture by a Catholic
priest on the potential dangers of invoking science to confirm one's
religious convictions. Part of his message was exactly the point you
have made, namely, that scientific findings have taken in the minds of
many people (and especially in the minds of people who understand almost
nothing of scientific method) a mantle of unassailable authority.

> We also seek to explain things unknown in terms of the known, and for a lot
> of Westerners Quantum mechanics is, I think, less alien than Buddhist
> doctrine.

I'm not sure that is true. Buddhist doctrine is pretty accessible to
everyone I have met, even to those who reject it. It's not at all
difficult to understand. It's just difficult to live by. It's even
difficult for some to want to live by it. But this has nothing to do
with being difficult to grasp. Quantum theory, on the other hand, is
quite difficult to grasp. And grasping it would not put one any further
ahead in the enterprise of living a dharmacentric life.

> I was amused recently to read John Blofeld
> invoking Einstein in his book on mantra... I can't recall exactly what view
> he attributed to the great Dr, but I remember laughing aloud and
> exclaiming "Bullshit!".

The older I get, the more I find that "Bullshit" is the most useful
mantra of all, especially when listening to many Buddhist religious
teachers.

> yes, depending of the authority that somebody can give to the science
> in the investigation of the mind. For somebody of this type, it can
> imply that the Mind  is something without a concrete localization.

I don't see how it matters whether or not the mind has a physical locus.
If it does have such a locus, then it is dependent and and impermanent.
That is enough to enable one to see the sort of reality that the Buddha
claimed is important to see. If the mind has no physical locus, so what?
How does believing that put one any further ahead?

> In this case, I think it can have consequences in concentration and
> mindfulness.

Concentration is pure technique, and it seems to be quite independent of
one's convictions or "knowledge". Mindfulness, in the Buddhist sense,
consists in recalling that all things are impermanent, non-self and (if
misapprehended) painful. None of those realizations is, as far as I can
see, either helped or hindered by any findings in neurophysiology.

> Is it possible to grasp Going for Refuge, and not live by it?

Yes, of course.

>  If you are not living by Going for Refuge, then to what extent can
> you be said to understand it?

I think one can understand it perfectly and yet either lack the will to
live by it or decide one does not really wish to live by it.

> I'm reminded of my friend Brent who is a mathematician. He cannot say
> anything meaningful to me about his field of interest because without at
> least several years of study there is no frame of reference. All I know is
> that it doesn't involve numbers. I think that dependent-origination is a
> bit like that as far as the many-people are concerned - there's no frame of
> reference.

I have never yet met a human being who did not grasp the basic idea of
causality and who could not grasp the notion that attachment leads to
frustration. We all have the frame of reference. That is what makes
dharma so transparent. If it were not transparent, it could not be
ehipassiko).

> If Buddhist doctrine is easily understood why don't you explain to us
> in short terms the difference between the T'ien T'ai and Hua-Yen doctrines
> of perfect interpenetration, or to put it differently the difference between
> the Hua-YEN Perfect Vehicle the highest level of its pan ch'iao and the
> Perfect Teaching the highest level of the T'ien T'ai pan ch'iao.

Buddhism is very easy to understand. Bullshit is not. What you are
asking me to explain is useless bullshit. Ask me about dharma, and I'll
give you a clear answer that probably even you could understand.

> It's only bullshit for those whose intellect is too weak to understand it.

Yes, I do have a very feeble intellect. Fortunately, dharma practice has
nothing to do with intellectual prowess. You see, it was not to only
intellectual giants such as yourself that Buddha spoke. He also
explained the dharma to people who would now be regarded as mentally
challenged (or what we used to call retarded), and even they became
arahants. So when dharma teachers go around creating abstruse doctrines
that are very difficult to grasp and even harder to explain, they are
really proving to the world nothing more than that they do not have the
skill and compassion of a buddha.

> Why don't you explain why the two doctrines most of the Buddhist world
> consider to be the highest are bullshit and not dharma.

Dharma liberates people from their kleshas. The doctrines you asked
about mostly confuse people and make them feel inferior. In Christian
circles the term that was used for such doctrines was obscurantism. This
refers to the deliberate use of abstruse language to intimidate people
so that one can exercise one's power over them. No religion is immune
from the effects of obscurantism. From what I have seen of your posts on
buddha-l, it is the only thing you trade in. Too bad. You're probably
not as much of a fatuous and ill-tempered showoff as you consistently
appear to readers of buddha-l. But your addiction to pseudo-profundity
makes you appear rather unattractive and pathetic to those of us who
love the liberative power of the Buddha's dharma more than we love
power-hungry pseudo-masters who waste their precious lives showing off
how clever they are. Such people are robbers who steal the time of
others and prevent others from attaining nirvana in a timely manner. If
such people are not deeply ashamed of themselves for trying to be
"profound" rather than actually being helpful, then I see no reason to
oblige their obsessive need for praise by congratulating them for being
wise.

> So if Dharma is so easy to understand as you say, I wonder why so many
> people don't understand it.

I don't grant your claim that people don't understand du.hkha. It seems
to me that everybody understands it. They just aren't willing to do what
they need to do to get rid of it. It's like that extra weight that some
people carry around on their bodies. It's no mystery what one needs to
do to get rid of excess weight. But overweight people are simply
unwilling to do what needs to be done. Similarly, it is obvious what one
needs to do to be rid of du.hkha, but some people are not willing to do
what needs to be done. Most people are willing to do what needs to be
done, but some people are quite neurotic and won't do what needs to be
done. They are Buddhists. The people who are capable of getting rid of
du.hkha don't need Buddha-dharma, just as people who aren't overweight
don't need special medical treatment.

>  The Buddha said, "Life is a pain and the  best  thing  one  could do
> with his time here is to try to escape from  it."

I think the Buddha said something more like this: "Clinging to
experience results in frustration, so the best one can do is to stop
clinging."

> I  don't  know many Buddhists who even accept this central
> teaching.

We must travel in different circles. Most of the Buddhists I know accept
this central teaching. They embrace it and understand it perfectly. But
they are too weak-willed to face up to what they must do to shed the
causes of their frustration.

> Maybe you are an incredible smart guy.

Very few people believe me, which proves that I am incredible, at least
to some people. But no one has ever accused me of being smart. In fact,
I'm pretty stupid. Fortunately, this is not a handicap when it comes to
Dharma, because, as I keep saying, grasping Dharma does not require
intelligence.

> I don't think we can possibly know what the Buddha said "simply and
> directly".

We can know exactly what Gotama Buddha said, in the same way we can know
exactly what Sherlock Holmes said. Gotama Buddha, like Sherlock Holmes,
is a character in a work of fiction. What he said is exactly what the
authors of those works of fiction made him say.

> How does essentialising your own position to be definitive "dharma"
> actually help your argument?

I'm not trying to make an argument. I'm simply expressing my own tastes,
as is everyone else who makes claims about what is profound. The
difference between me and some other folks is that I know I am merely
stating arbitrary preferences and thus not essentializing anything at all.

> He who has reached the goal, is fearless, is without craving,
> is passionless,  has  cut off the thorns of life. This is his
> final body (Dhp. 351).

True, because such a person has given up striving to have only what he
likes and to avoid what he does not like. So I still maintain that the
entirety of Buddhism can be understood very easily if one just hears it
spoken clearly: striving to get what one wants and to avoid what one
does not want leads to frustration, and frustration ends the moment we
stop striving.

Mind you, on one of the hell realms known as a news group
(talk.religion.buddhism) I have been reviled as a "mere Stoic". That may
be true. But I maintain the Buddha was also a "mere" Stoic, devant le
nom. (I am reminded of an observation by, I think, Cantwell Smith: there
is no quicker way to cut oneself off from the potential benefit of a
teaching than to qualify it by the word "mere".)

> I can't see how you can say that because what the Buddha is doing
> is teaching a meditation method to Ko.t.thita.

Yes, of course. It is a meditation that helps Ko.t.thita grasp the
simple truth that the aggregates when clinging is absent are not du.hkha.

> That doesn't make any sense to me. The problem is not trying to get
> what one wants and to avoid what one doesn't want.

I merely reporting what the Buddha said the problem is. Perhaps he was
wrong, but I have to confess it has always made a lot of sense to me.

> I don't know if you are a Stoic, but the Buddha was not one. As far
> as I know, the Buddha didn't believe in absolute determinism.

Of course the Buddha was not a Stoic. The Stoics lived in the
Hellenistic world and had doctrines that the Buddha would have rejected.
But there is quite a lot of similarity between the Stoic message and the
Buddha's message, and I think one ignores both the Stoics and the Buddha
at one's peril. As for me, I don't wear labels very well, because I have
never met a teacher whose teachings I liked as much as I like my own.

> Notice we never see any criticism from him about Communist China where
> 50,000 people a year are executed(source BBC) or Islamic countries where
> tyranny runs rampant his only criticisms are reserved for the U.S. where he
> doesn't have to worry about retribution.

Oh for crying out loud, Steven. You can bet you last testicle that if I
were a citizen of those countries, I would criticize them aplenty. You
see, my tendency is to work on the evil at home before blaming those who
live in other countries.

> Another good idea Richard. Since you seem to despise the U.S. so much

Sorry, Steven, but you missed this diagnosis by a country mile. The fact
is, I am critical of the incompetent government and the insipid popular
culture of this country precisely because I love it and want it to live
up to its own noble ideals, which I am, well, idealistic enough to
admire with every fibre of my being.

Please don't take this personally, Steven, but you are talking like the
kind of malleable and complacent patriotic idiot that helps to elect the
sort of people who destroy their own countries and take much of the
world down with them. I have a suggestion for you. Grow up and learn to
think for yourself instead of bleating like a sheep. One way to achieve
this would be to take up the practice of Buddhism, in which I assume
your presence on this list indicates you have at least a passing
interest.

> Making such a shift happen is worthy of all of our
> collective skillful means, particularly those of us living in the
> US. I think this is at least part of what critics of America like
> Richard are trying to accomplish. Where I think Richard is wrong is
> in his methodology.  His criticisms are too one sided, and
> don't leave any room for a fresh approach that doesn't buy into the
> usual steroetypes of "left" vs. "right".

I have only one minor quibble with your analysis. I really
think the words "left" and "right" and "liberal" and
"conservative" have pretty much lost all meaning. They
have mostly become terms of abuse, especially in the
United States of America. A situation has been created in
which the words "liberal" and "conservative" define, in
the minds of most people, a false dichotomy. In reality, I
think most of the people I know could accurately be
described as both liberal and conservative. The "fresh
approach" we need is in fact a return to an understanding
of those words that would allow people to see themselves
as both liberal (generous, open-minded, willing to accept
change) and conservative (preserving what is good in
tradition, living in accordance with universal moral
norms).

That the terms "left" and "right" have lost all meaning
became apparent when George W. Bush described John Kerry
as being "way over on the left bank." From which I sit
there is no way in the world in which a man like Kerry
could be considered left of centre. Dennis Kucinich might
be (from a Canadian point of view) slightly left of
centre. But in general, I think we should retire those
words altogether, just as we should retire the terms
"Hinayana" and "Mahayana".

> Religious shopping as a concept fits in Weber's 'The Protestant Ethic and
> the Spirit of Capitalism'.

Not really. Weber argued that the spirit of capitalism came from the
combined emphases on moral integrity and asceticism in pietistic
Christians. The integrity made Christians successful in business and
therefore prosperous. The asceticism made successful Christian
businessmen unlikely to be self-indulgent in buying unnecessary items.
So rather than buying goods with the money, they reinvested in their
businesses, and through their investments made even more money.

Weberian capitalism, based on a Protestant (and one might also say
Buddhist and Jain and Muslim) ethic, is all but dead in America.
Religious asceticism and frugality has almost completely given way to
rampant self-indulgent consumerism. The average American, I read not
long ago, has something like $9000 worth of credit card debt, not to
mention mortgages and car payments. The Economist has argued that a
significant factor in America's current economic crisis is the amount of
personal debt of citizens, which is as out of control as the American
waistline. This, says the Economist, is at least as serious as the
completely reckless spending of the fiscally irresponsible Bush
administration. If only American capitalism WERE Weberian!

> This new law has some funny surprises, one of them is that a christmas tree
> had to be removed from a school in Lagny-sur-Marne (Seine-et-Marne), because
> it was considered as a religious symbol by a group of students of
> "non-identified religious confession".

Meanwhile, here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, the
Christian Texiban is urging shoppers to boycott stores that have signs
saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". Shopping, the most
sacred ritual Americans do, must be understood to be a Christian
enterprise and not some generically religious undertaking.

> I really ought to stay out of discussions on topics about which I know
> next to nothing.

Why? I long ago discovered that my sole skill in life lay in saying
things so egregiously uninformed and outrageously ill conceived that
others would be incited to respond by saying something authoritative and
wise. Provoking the competent into displaying their strengths is one of
the many ways of making a modest contribution.

> We had also talked about the general issues that were discussed here
> regarding the new Christian right, and she also expressed the opinion that
> we (i.e. various stripes of Buddhist) shouldn't let them get away with it.
> We, she thinks, are too soft.

While I agree that we Buddhists (and, for that matter, liberal
Christians, Jews and Muslims) should not let hard-core dogmatists get
away with their dogmatism, it is not always obvious how one actually
should go about not letting them get away with it. To be a Buddhist, or
any other kind of religious liberal, is to be somewhat soft and
relativistic, at least compared to a dogmatic absolutist. How can one
dedicated to softness make it clear that being hard-minded is not
acceptable without becoming hard-minded in the process? This, I think,
is the principal koan of our times.

> I think you should think of people like Gandhi (the guy who got India
> freed from the British).

I do think of Gandhi, and I find his methods and example of taking the
moral high road while provoking others into violence counterproductive
and psychologically sick.

>  The challenge is not to be soft and yielding but to have the courage
> to confront ... even if it means your own life.

Anyone who would give up any life, including his own, for a principle is
hardly a good role model for a Buddhist.

> As a Christian, would you denounce God and Christ if a man held a gun
> to you head said "denounce them or die".  The true Christian would
> take the bullet.

I can't speak for Christians. I'm a Buddhist. There is nothing to which
I am so attached that I would recommend that anyone die for it.

> As a Buddhist would you kill a person to save your own life

I hope not. Of course, everyone is capable of doing the wrong thing
under duress.

> There are just some things you will die for, and other things that are
> not worth your time.

So far you have not given me any reason to believe that it is rational,
responsible or moral to die, or let others die, for any cause. Sorry,
but I just do not admire stupidity, especially stupidity that results in
anyone's death.

> I think that to be 'dedicated to softness' is just another word for 
> being lazy and smug.

So you think that not being judgemental is a kind of moral laziness? 
You are entitled to that view, but you would have to come up with some
reasons in defense of it if you would want anyone to agree with you.

> I'm not so sure if all those 'soft people' are really that good and
> sincere.

There is no way on heaven or earth to know how another person thinks.
You prefer to to be cynical about others' motives, and I prefer to give
them the benefit of the doubt. I know for sure that giving people the
benefit of the doubt makes me far happier than being cynical makes me,
so I choose not to be cynical. But if being cynical works better for
you, then that is the option you should choose.

> Sometimes being honest and confronting is much better then just
> giving in for the sake of peace.

For some of us, opting for peace is precisely our way of being honest.
We are fortunate in that we need not choose between honesty and peace.

> The standard progression is wisdom born from hearing, contemplation,
> and meditation. It's in the Abhidharmakosha and probably a hundred
> other places.

Yes, it's pretty much universal in Buddhist literature, and indeed in
most Brahmanical and Jain literature. By the way, the final term in the
trio, bhaavanaa, does not mean meditation at all. It means bringing into
existence or cultivating. So the progression is 1) hearing about
virtues, 2) reflecting on them (which is where meditation comes in) and
3) making them arise in oneself (which is where the work comes in and
where most work-shy North American Buddhists therefore exit).

In traditional Christianity there is a triad that is identical in
meaning to this pan-Indian triad. I forget the exact terms--perhaps
Stanley Ziobro or someone else can recall them. Something like lectio,
meditatio and a third term that means realization.

> Buddhism is a living tradition and the many questions about it are best
> answered through asking its practitioners. I am no sociologist, but if
> I wanted an answer to the question of whether realization is
> inexpressible, I would start by asking practitioners who claimed to
> have experienced realization rather than trying to parse the verses of
> the Abhidharmakosha or deduce the answer from philosophical argument.

I have been hanging out with practitioners for thirty-five years and got
into academic study of Buddhism because of my practice rather than vice
versa. The thing is, I have never encountered a single individual who
claimed to have attained realization, nor have I met a single
practitioner who was so convinced that anything is inexpressible that
he or she kept silent. I have, however, encountered hundreds who
recommend (and do) study of Buddhist texts and regard such study as
indispensible to their practice.

> You suggest that the opinion of the mainstream is "incomprehensible
> and useless."

No, that is not what I said. What I said, I think, is that something
that is incomprehensible and useless is not worth paying attention to,
whether or not it is the mainstream. In fact, I doubt very much that
what you claim is mainstream really is mainstream in Buddhism. I think
you have a romantic view of Buddhism that tells us a lot more about your
own Western prejudices than it tells us about Buddhism.

> So for these reasons I still stubbornly hold to the opinion that I
> originally expressed.

As long as you acknowledge that your position is rooted in stubbornness
rather than in being well informed, there is hope for you 

> My Zen teacher is Roshi Joshu Sasaki, head of Rinzai-ji. I once asked
> him if he had "achieved" "realization" (both words are nonsense, hence
> separately quotationized). He giggled.

A while back Tom Tilley observed that Buddhist stream-entry is similar
(I think he said "identical") to Christian rebirth (or whatever the noun
form of "born again" would be). There is a sense in which they are quite
similar, in that each involves a metanoia. But there is also a very
important dissimilarity, which is that a Buddhist NEVER talks about
attaining stream entry, whereas Christians seem to be fond of
proclaiming loudly that they have been saved by accepting Jesus into
their hearts.

Since the time of the Buddha there has been a kind of taboo against
admitting one's achievements. The reason for not talking about one's
attainments is that ordinary people tend to be unnecessarily and
unhealthily reverential toward anyone they think has "made it". 

> Lauritzen said that it was not his intention to insult anyone.

I'm sure he was right. As President Truman once said "I never give
people hell. I just tell them the truth, and they think it's hell."

> He added, "The anger expressed in my e-mail was blameworthy, and I
> apologize for it."

Anger is blameworthy. Telling the truth about the dangerous tyrants who
have stolen America is not.

> I don't see any inherent incompatability between the teachings of the
> Buddha and the Christ

Jesus and Gotama both seem like pretty nice guys to me. It was their
followers who messed everything up, thereby illustrating the Indian
proverb "Every teacher is murdered by his own disciples."

> What I foresee is a melding of Buddhist and Christian thought.

No need to use foresight. It has already happened in a lot of very
interesting ways.

> Although admittedly I'm no scholar of Buddhism, I'm not aware of any
> Buddhist tradition that says the experience of realization is
> conceptual.

I am not aware of any Buddhist tradition that puts much emphasis on the
experience of nirvana. Nirvana is not an experience, really, it is a
state of having eradicated afflictions. The absence of anything can be
known only through inference, not directly. From this it would follow
that nirvana can be known only inferentially, that is, conceptually. So
says Dharmakiirti, and I believe he makes a very good case for his
position.

Dharmakiirti also says that conceptual thinking is important because it
is the only means of gaining knowledge about what one must do. Knowing
how to act requires having a plan for the future, and having a good plan
for the future requires understanding the past. None of that can be done
through direct experience. Direct experience only provides the raw
material for conceptual thinking, and conceptual thinking is what
delivers the goods, inculding the ultimate good of nirvana.

> So I feel I'm in the mainstream of Buddhist thought and I'm
> not trying to smuggle some Vedantin philosophy into Buddhism.

There is no virtue of being in the mainstream of anything if the
mainstream is incomprehensible and useless. So unless your aim is (to
borrow a title of a poem by James Dickey) "drowning with others," forget
about being in the mainstream. If you are interested in making a bit of
progress toward nirvana, then you'd better put on your thinking cap.

> I don't think saying all concepts are empty means the same thing as
> saying all propositions are irrelevant, or ultimately false, or
> undecidable, etc. In fact, such an understanding of emptiness strikes
> me as contradictory.

On this point you are quite right, I think. Saying that a concept is
empty means only that the concept is not absolute and is related to
other concepts. But surely that does not at all entail that the concept
is meaningless, useless, false or self-contradictory. Indeed, as you
say, it is precisely because concepts are pliable and fluid that they
can be of any use at all in a world that is also fluid and constantly
changing.

> But what do I know? When I raised the same objection to Khenpo Karthar
> after one of his talks, he just replied, "that just proves that all
> conceptual thought is contradictory." I was left with my mouth hanging
> open at the audaciousness of his reply and couldn't think of a thing to
> say.

Wow! What a story. Sounds like it may be time to find another teacher.
Anyone who says anything that stupid, even in jest, would be close to
worthless to me as a spiritual companion, although others may benefit
from them. Alas, it has been my lot to keep bumping into Buddhists who
say the sort of thing you report the Khen-po as saying, which could be
why I eventually learned to keep well away from Buddhist teachers and
other Buddhist practitioners and follow a relatively solitary path.

> Perhaps Republicans are the way they are and act destructively because
> they think that nobody loves them.

I think the main problem is that they think God loves them, so they
don't care whether anyone else does. That is why they do so well without
the approval of Buddhists and other ungodly critters.

> The worse is that some Cristian God-lovers don't even seem to
> see the core of the narrative that they proclaim is their guide.

Fortunately, over here in Jesussylvania we are beginning to hear the
voices of evangelical Christians saying, increasing loudly, "The bible
has over 2000 passages about the duty to care for the poor and the lame,
and it has only one passage against homosexuality and no passages at all
against abortion or gun control." The "God, guns and gays" Christians
have hijacked Christianism to about the same extent that Muslim
fundamentalists have hijacked Islam and anti-Tamil hawks have hijacked
Sri Lankan Buddhism.

> This, I think, is the difficulty with a purely rationalist approach to
> Buddhism. It simply doesn't account for any realization that cannot be
> expressed in language.

If there were any realization that could not be expressed in language,
that would be a failing. But it has not been established yet that there
is anything that can't be expressed in language. And without rational
argumentation there is no way you can establish such a thing.

You see, what Buddhism is all about is eliminating the afflictions, the
principal one of which is delusion. And that is very easy to eliminate
just by cultivating the habit of thinking clearly. There is no need at
all to resort the subterfuge of mystery and ineffability.

> Whether it's childish or not isn't something I'm going to touch, but
> there's a longstanding tradition among Zen masters of shocking students
> into awakening.

Yes, I recall such behavior from my Zen days. The story that such
conduct is meant to shock students into awakening provides a convenient
mask that covers up a great deal that might more accurately be 
described as abuse.

> I always thought that the point of going to a teacher was to receive
> guidance toward awakening.

There is no need for teachers. What one needs is interaction with other
people who are kind enough to point out one's blind spots. We all have
them. Even buddhas and gurus and swamis have them. That's why we all
need friends who will kindly point them out to us. But pointing out
another person's blind spots requires no special training or expertise.
A child can do it.

> Don't most teachers employ some method of measuring students'
> understanding?

A person does not need to be tested by anyone to know whether or not she
has afflictions. If one feels pain, disappointment, frustration, guilt,
anger or resistance, then one has afflictions. Life itself is the test.
A teacher is superfluous, especially since they all flunk the test about
as badly as their disciples do.

> I can only assume that you test your students periodically, either
> through actual exams or through thesis papers.

No, I don't do any such thing. I don't have the faintest idea how to
take the measure of another human being's insight or understanding.
What I do is to inflict needless harm on students by giving them grades
that gratuitously hurt their feelings and dampen their enthusiasm to
learn. I do this because it is required by the university regulations.
Grading students is an inhumane and anti-intellectual practice that has
no redeeming virtues. I'm sure we would not do it at all if we were not
required to do so by the major corporations that have bought the
universities and want us to make sure everyone is a consumer of
unnecessary goods by the time they graduate. I am ashamed of the way I
make a living, for it falls far short of right livelihood. Alas, I have
no skills except that of tormenting students, so I have no other way of
making a living. But that's my own fault, and I live with the
consequences. Spiritual guides are not required by anyone's regulations
to take the measure of their students, so it is even more disgraceful
when they pretend to do so.

> If it were possible to express everything in words, then a person born and
> raised in the Library of Congress would be able to understand just every
> salient detail about life in the outside world without ever stepping out
> the door. But how could he understand the flavor of coriander from its
> description alone?

Very easy. He would pay attention to what somebody was saying when she
said "This is coriander. Taste it." No one has ever claimed that
language can do more than indicate some possibilities and offer some
invitations.

You show every sign of being committed to a dogmatic Buddhist view that
you are determined to hold no matter what. Small wonder that your
teacher needs to hit you with a stick. If you were more capable of
rational discourse, you might be spared some blows.

> But surely there are things yet to be about which we cannot yet
> talk.

True enough. But when they arrive, we shall be able to talk about them.
In other words, I doubt very much that there are topics about which
nothing can be said or thought. And therefore I see no reason to go
around shocking people into silence, as thought silence were somehow
more profoundly insightful than careful thinking and speaking.

> But they do relate a story of Lin Ji using a stick (as they tell it,
> a shit stick) to whack a particularly difficult student into wordless
> insight.

This goes to show you not to believe everything you hear in an American
Buddhist center. Americans, and especially those Americans who like to
think of themselves as wisely non-conformist, have a deep prejudice
against rationality, and I fear that prejudice has infected their uptake
of Buddhism, thus making them pretty hard to tell apart from
run-of-the-mill Bible thumpers.

> Anything can be expressed in words, but not everyone will understand the
> expression.  I think it may require a prior experience - one that can be
> recalled.

Yes, that is pretty much the way language works.

> If one cannot recall such an experience, then perhaps there is
> another way to trigger it.

One cannot trigger a memory of something that one has never done. None
of us has attained nirvana, or we wouldn't have been reborn here. Surely
talking about nirvana as something that it would be nice to attain is
the best first step to take. The rest of it just requires eliminating
greed, hatred and delusion. Nothing needs to be triggered to do that
little task, whether by language or any other means. It just takes a bit
of effort. A good way to encourage someone to make that effort, of
course, is to talk to them. This is probably better in the long run than
being silent to them. People don't know what the hell to make of
silence. Ninety percent of the idiots occupying the earth today
interpret silence as hostility, whereas hardly anyone misconstrues
speaking as hostility.

> So academics are not practitioners?

A fascinating topic, which probably should be in a different thread, is
the question of what exactly people mean by "practitioner." North
American Buddhists, it seems to me, have about the narrowest sense of
what "practice" entails of any Buddhists in the world. Is that because of
immaturity, insecurity, just plain ignorance or blinding insight?

> Generally speaking, I've found that actual monks are far less likely
> to make the same sort of sweeping generalizations about Buddhism that
> most Westerners (particularly those Westerners in the academic
> community) are so keen on making.

Was that a seeping generalization? It sort of looked like one. My own
experience has been that academics I have known in the area of Buddhist
studies are, with only very few exceptions, serious practitioners. Many,
in fact, are former monastics. I have heard remarkably few sweeping
generalizations from my colleagues in Buddhist studies. Where I have
heard more have been, as you say, from North American Buddhists, whether
monastic or lay, who have not had the benefit of academic training in
Asian languages and philosophy. Here's where my prejudices lie, I
suppose. I can't take any Buddhist very seriously who doesn't know
Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan or Chinese (preferably all four).

> Hmm, I feel a new cosmogony could be born out of this idyllic fact.

It wasn't a fact. It was a story. Like most things I say, it has no
connection to reality. My wife has never said anything even similar to
what I reported her saying. She's not the sort of person who says things
like that. I'm the sort of person who says things like that, except I
don't like to take responsibility for the things I say, so I try to put
these ideas into the mouths of the Buddha, my wife, Jesus Christ, David
Ferensc and Noam Chomsky. In this way, I reckon I am a lot like the guys
who compiled suttas and sutras. Not wanting to take responsibility for
their own thoughts, they put them into the mouth of an essentially
fictitious character called the Buddha.

>RPH> So if something is important, be sure there is a word
>RPH> for it.
>it is totally on the contrary. If something is truly important be sure
>there are not words for it.

On this matter I prefer the thinking of Dharmakirti, who argues that all
language arises out of desire. So we have words for the things we find
important, such as foods, tools, and implements, but also for abstract
things such as moral integrity, nirvana and enlightenment. And, says
Dharmakirti, we even have names for things we would like to exist but that
don't.

Just reflecting on my own life and mind, I can't think of anything that has
mattered to me that I cannot discuss pretty thoroughly. The only things for
which I don't have words are trivialities.

>I thought the tradition was that there are two valid sources
>of knowledge, direct experience and inference, and only the second was
>expressed in words.

That is correct. And that is exactly what I said. Direct experience is only
of momentary particulars, and it is not associated with concepts. Therefore,
there is no understanding in direct experience. Understanding requires
relating what one is experiencing to other experiences in the past, and that
cannot be done without concepts. So understanding not only can be, but must
be, expresed in words. As for what is directly experienced, it is not spoken
about when it is being experienced, but when it is understood, it can be
talked about. And everything tht can be experienced can eventually be
understood. Therefore, there is no experience that cannot be talked about.
The talking will not, of course, reproduce the exact particular experience,
but it may very well yield another experience quite similar to the one that
got all the talking started. So talking and thinking is quite important.
That's why buddhas do it, and that's why wise people do not disparage it.

> Ok what is mappo???

The Lotus Sutra speaks of an age of decadent dharma, during which time
the very opposite of dharma will be taught as dharma. One example of
this eventuality might be, say, the leader of a formerly great nation
being perceived as a pious Christian despite the fact that he does such
obviously un-Christian acts as starting wars, showing no clemency to
mentally retarded criminals sentenced to death, devastating the
environment and passing laws that favor the rich and disadvantage the
poor. Speaking hypothetically, if such a leader should arise, then it
would be seen as a sign of the dharma being in serious decline.

Another sign of the dharma being is serious decline, of course, would be
seeing a text such as the Lotus Sutra being accepted as a Buddhist text.

>> I am utterly opposed to having convictions so strong that I insist that
>> others live by them. (Or, as the Buddha said, "Any belief held so firmly
>> that one regards those who disagree as fools is a prison.")
>
> Could you, would you, be so kind as to cite the source for this?

It's a liberal rendering of a verse in my favourite text of all, the
Sutta-nipaata. The verse in question occurs in the Paramaa.t.thaka
section. A less free translation would be along these lines:

"The wise say it is a form of bondage to reply only on what is familiar
and to regard everything else as inferior."

This bears a certain resemblance to Peirce's first principle of reason,
which is to resist accepting all ideas that immediately seem appealing
to oneself. (Peirce's principle appeals to me so much that I have spent
my entire life resisting it.)

> The Buddha teaches that all things are empty.

Surely the truth of this proposition defines on how one defines
"buddha". Not all Buddhist texts teach emptiness. In some traditions it
is said that what all buddhas teach is just this: doing what is
beneficial, avoiding harmful actions and keeping the mind pure. These
are all enterprises that one can do very well without the concept of
emptiness.

> But my point is simply that many Buddhists do hold beliefs that are in
> some ways inconcsistent with atheism.

That may be an overly strong claim. I think one might be able to defend
the weaker claim, that some Buddhists hold views that are compatible
with theism. But can you name a single Buddhist doctrine that would
require a belief in God?

> I am curious about one point here.  I have always understood atheism to
> be a positive declaration that God does not exist.  I have generally
> understood that a conventional Buddhist view is that of non-theism, that
> the existence or non-existence of god is irrelevant to Buddhism, since
> all concepts are empty (as has been pointed out).

This depends on what you mean by "conventional". You are right, I think,
in observing that in the Pali canon, there is no great concern with the
question of whether a supreme god exists, because no one was yet
believing such a thing. It was only when some people began to argue that
there is a single creator who is the ultimate source of all created
things and the author of infallible scriptures that Buddhists said "No,
*that* sort of god does not exist, and there are no infallible scriptures
anywhere to be found."

The notion of God that is rejected by most Buddhists is the notion of
God as a male or female creator and lord of the universe who blurts out
commandments and punishes those who do not follow them and has favorite
tribes that he calls chosen people and gives people land that is theirs
in perpetuity. But if God is a name that one gives to essentially
impersonal dharmas such as love and harmony and connectedness with all
things, and especially if God is not seen as something outside oneself
and not outside the others with whom one is connected, then such a
notion is quite acceptable.

> Is there in an agnostic position (as I understand Pali Buddhism by the
> letter) or are some Buddhists inclined to take an atheist position
> (as, p.e. in modernist Singalese buddhism) in interreligious dialogue?

I would not describe my position (which may or may not be shared by
other Buddhists) as agnostic. Rather, I would describe it as
indifferent. I just don't think it matters very much at all whether
there is a god, because I would not act any differently if the answer
were yes than if it were no. When I hear the term "agnostic" it conjures
up the idea that someone would perhaps like to know the answer to a
question but lacks the means of finding an answer. I would not see
myself as an agnostic in that sense, but rather as one who does not at
all care about the question. Perhaps the term I am looking for is that I
am "apathetic" about the question. I think the Buddha recommended apathy
much more than he recommended agnosticism. I think he saw the world as
pathetic and saw that the best way not to be pathetic is to be
apathetic.

> I do not believe that Clinton intended to say that we have to make up
> some convictions to make others live up to.

I also do not believe that. Clinton is much too wise and secure to foist
his way of thinking onto others. Perhaps I am wrong, but I think it may
be mostly a sign of insecurity to require agreement from others.

The convictions you identify as liberal...

> (universal health care; caring for old, sick poor; liberal education
> for our children; control and limiting of powers or rapacious
> corportations; a fair wage; equality of women, gays, brown-skinned
> people and other minorities, etc.)

...are very much what people like David Loy argues are at the heart of
Buddhist social ethics. He makes a convincing case for this hypothesis
in various books, but especially in The Great Awakening: Buddhist
Social Theory.

There is a thought-provoking statement in Peter Singer's The
President of Good and Evil: Questioning the Ethics of George W.
Bush that also reflects what I would identify as a predominately
Buddhist way of looking at social justice (although Singer himself 
would not describe it as Buddhist):

begin{quote}
 It would be a mistake to believe that the ideal of equality of
 opportunity offers an adequate conception of a just society. Even if
 every child did have an equal place at the starting line, that would
 not make the society just. The metaphor of the starting line
 suggests that life is a race. In any athletic competition, natural
 differences in ability and temperament will play a major role in
 deciding the winner. We no more deserve our natural abilities than
 we deserve the wealth of our parents. Our society rewards those who
 are good at sport or who are beautiful and can act or sing well, but
 gives very little to those who have nothing to sell in the
 marketplace except their physical labor---and even less to those
 who are incapable of labor. There is nothing inherently just about
 this arrangement. Even in a society in which everyone does start
 with an equal opportunity to prosper as far as their natural
 abilities allow them to, it may be just to to relieve the distress
 of those who end up at the bottom. By this measure, the European
 Union, Canada and Australia are closer to being just societies than
 is the United States.
end{quote}

I suppose one could also say that the EU, Canada and Australia are much
closer to be Buddhist countries than is the United States. The USA, as
it now is, is surely one of the least just and therefore least moral
societies currently waving a national flag. But it could be worse. In
fact, I think we are about to see just how much worse it can get.

> The much hated, reviled, and ridiculed Bill Clinton said last night
> that the Democrats can never become a truly national party again until
> they are comfortable talking about their own convictions.

I am utterly opposed to having convictions so strong that I insist that
others live by them. (Or, as the Buddha said, "Any belief held so firmly
that one regards those who disagree as fools is a prison.")

> The day Dukakis stood up in a tank and boldly exclaimed "I am no
> liberal" I knew we were sunk.

It is amazing how much mileage people can get out of redefining words.
The dictionary defines "liberal" in such a way that I cannot imagine
anyone not striving to be one. Yet some folks, who have apparently lost
their dictionaries, insist that "liberal" means "socialist." (Hell, even
if it DID mean that, I'd still strive to be a liberal. But I digress.)

A lot of mileage has also been wrung (if one can wring miles without
mixing metaphors) out of redefining the word "redefining." So, for
example, those who wish to allow two or more people who love one another
to live together and receive the same benefits as those who are legally
married are now being accused of "redefining" marriage, as if that in
itself were reason enough to oppose such scoundrels. I hear few
complaints about those bold-minded Christian bishops in the tenth
century who redefined marriage to mean the union between one man and one
woman, thus ending nearly a millennium-long practice of polygamy among
Christians. I hear few complaints about those Yankee politicians who
redefined the word "citizen" to include women and (much later) native
Americans. I almost never hear anyone complaining about those people who
redefined the word "messiah/christos" to mean somebody found guilty of
insurrection and executed by being nailed to a tree. Indeed,
redefinition used to be regarded as a noble act of moving closer to the
truth. And yet "redefinition" has now come to be seen as something
frightening done only by "liberal activists".

Pinning labels on people as a quick means of dismissing them as unworthy
of further attention is hardly new, of course. Buddhists early on
learned to revile other Buddhists by pointing out their similarities to
Brahmins. And when that stopped working (because pretty well all
influential Buddhists were, in fact, Brahmins), Buddhists reviled other
Buddhists by calling them Hinayanins. And after the council of Lhasa,
Tibetan Buddhists reviled other Tibetan Buddhists by pointing out how
similar they were to advocates of Chan. And here in the West, a Buddhist
can get away with reviling another Buddhist by pointing out how much she
resembles a materialist, or a Catholic, or a Republican.

Nowadays, in American discourse at least, the terms "liberal" and
"conservative" and "left-wing" and "right-wing" have very nearly lost
all meaning. They have become, like the word "terrorist", nothing more
than a way of expressing knee-jerk disapproval for the subhuman status
of the person so labeled.

> I would suggest, though, that with few exceptions, "all of humanity" is
> pretty much mired in sectarian language, so is it not better to learn how
> to use sectarian language in a way that reveals its universality and its
> humanity?

Why learn to use sectarian language in such a way when one can achieve
the same effect without it?

> Heaven and hell, last judgement, washed in the blood of the lamb,
> god's chosen people, buddha-nature, jihad, etc. these are not useless
> concepts

Exactly which one of them do you find useful? I can't detect much
usefulness in any of the examples you give above.

> they tell us something about ourselves and our human journey

Speak for yourself. You are not speaking to my condition.

> Buddhanature is the sign that you believe human nature is divine at
> its core.

And that is why I reject the notion of Buddha nature. I don't see any
evidence that anything is divine at its core. I'm an atheist, remember?
Not do I believe that anyone is basically good or basically evil. Must I
say it yet again? I believe, along with Vasubandhu, that every mentality
contains a mixture of competent (kusala) and incompetent (akusala)
dharmas. Perhpas you would prefer to say good and evil. Suit yourself.
The terminology does not matter. What matters is the fact that our
mentalities are mixed, and that fact, I think, is hardly a matter of
dispute.

What is more controversial is what ought to be done about that fact.
Some hold the view that if a person has more evil than good, then he or
she should be killed or otherwise discarded. And so we have those who
feel they can justify capital punishment and war. I disagree with them,
because I agree what you said in an earlier message, namely, that it is
a very bad practice to demonize others. I don't know how to decide that
someone is worthy of death except by demonizing them. So my practice of
not demonizing others entails my practice of not killing others, and of
not condoning my government's killing others.

> Like when one is confronted with the "evil" of someone,
> one could naturally judge and perhaps condemn that person, but one's
> practice of believing in that person's Buddhanature would prevent one of
> doing so.

Another way to achieve the same thing, which requires no use of the
concept of buddha-nature, is to simply to depersonalize what one
experiences. So instead of seeing an evil person, one learns to see a
set of conditioned dharmas that could be made less harmful if the
conditions of their production were removed. So instead of seeing
someone as an evil terrorist who must be destroyed, one might see a lot
of anger that could be removed if its conditions were removed. Then one
does not focus on killing people but of neutralizing anger and replacing
it with more productive dharmas. If one cultivates the habit of thinking
in this way, then whether one thinks in terms of buddha-nature or not,
one can do as you (and Saint Augustine) recommend:

> judge and condemn the act, but never the person.

It is, incidentally, precisely in this practice of focusing on
impersonal dharmas rather than on the person who temporarily have them,
that I find the most fertile common ground in speaking as a Buddhist to
my Christian friends. 

> But, in the wake of this troubled and troubling election, I've been
> highly discouraged and even contemplated emigration.

I readily admit that the thought of returning to Canada crossed my mind,
but the thought was quickly dismissed by several considerations. First,
here in the USA is where there is the most work to be done. If one
believes in the environment, in science, in justice, in economic
fairness and in peace, there is a great need in this country for work to
be done in all those areas. Second, policies in the USA have an effect,
usually a negative one, just about everywhere in the world; when one
lives outside the USA, one feels powerless.

>> Another way to achieve the same thing, which requires no use of the
>> concept of buddha-nature, is to simply to depersonalize what one
>> experiences.
>
> Yes, if one can "simply" do this, then that is excellent. But many of us
> tend to see things from a human point of view (man is the measure of
> everything etc.) and project anthropomorphic features on the reality as
> they experience it.

But surely the project of Buddhism is to learn as quickly as possible,
through practice, how not to take things personally. Most people I have
known who take up Buddhist forms of meditation can learn to do this
fairly quickly, without resorting to a half-way measure of resorting to
the fantasy of a Buddha nature.

> And I have nothing against illusion, contrariwise I
> love it and can't get enough of it as must be all too obvious.

To each his own. There is no accounting for tastes. I have no objection
at all to people living in their own fantasy worlds, so long as they do
not take their fantasies as a standard by which to judge others. For at
least ten years I have know Robin, and I am aware of his penchant for
Buddha-nature teachings. That is fine. I just wished to remind him that
Buddha-nature is not a necessary feature of Buddhism, for one can
achieve everything without the doctrine that one can achieve through
it.

> The less dogmatism, the less attachment or the less passion the better the
> exchange.

Yes, that is what I was trying, in my usually awkward and bumbling way,
to say. Thank you for saying with more eloquently than I was able to 
do.

> But for heaven's sake, that *is* Buddha nature -- the potential or capacity
> of a so-called being, any being, to free itself from dharmas of greed,
> hatred and delusion.

So we agree completely that one need not have the concept of
Buddha-nature, since it is nothing more than an alternative name for
kusala-dhammas. I prefer the language of kus'ala-dharma, simply because
it is more universally human. One can speak of kus'ala-dharmas without
offending anyone at all, but when one starts using language such as
Buddha-nature, such language can alienate non-Buddhists. When given a
choice between speaking to and about all of humanity in neutral language
and speaking to and about them in language loaded with sectarian
overtones, I will take the former every time.

> How do you know they're motivated by greed, etc? What's you evidence?

I believe in making inferences, and I acknowledge that inferential
reasoning is always fallible. So where I begin with is the observation
that a person's actions do not appear to be consistent with what they
say their beliefs are. One of my favorite Christian authors is Jim
Wallis. He's a conservative evangelical born-again Christian. He argues,
rightly I think, that when a Christian reduces the entire edifice of
Christian morality to two issues, abortion and same-sex marriages, then
that Christian has failed to take into consideration the full range of
what Christ and his followers have taught. So if one sees abortion as an
absolute moral evil, one must also see war and the death penalty as
absolute evils, not to mention poverty that results from economic
injustice and other forces that degrade and devalue human beings. So in
Wallis's view a Christian who votes for Bush just because Bush would
like to pass constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriages and
abortion, then that Christian is living in ignorance of Christian
morality and is motivated mostly by fear and hatred. And people who vote
for a president who promises them tax cuts are probably operating
largely on the basis of greed, rather than Christian principles of
charity. I think Wallis is right, and I think what he says could easily
enough be expressed in Buddhist terms.

> Oh, and you say you don't believe in buddhanature. So these people
> are not by nature good. They could be by nature evil.

I don't believe people are either good or evil by nature. I think all
human beings, including probably buddhas, are a mixture of drives, some
of those drives producing expected and desired results while others are
counterproductive. We all succeed sometimes, and none of us is immune
from failure. Why embellish that depiction of things with unnecessary
and essentially meaningless categories such as good and evil?

> However, the gerundive agendum means that
> which is to be done, and the American English agenda refers to the
> schedule of a meeting. Were we to confuse the two, we might actually
> conclude that something is actually supposed to be accomplished at
> meetings, surely a sad delusion.

Your reasoning is impeccable. My observation of meetings is that the
things to be done (agenda) at the beginning of a meeting still remain to
be done at the end of the meeting. There is an economy in that, for it
means one can make up one agenda for an endless number of meetings.

The actual purpose of meetings has never been clear to me, but I assume
it is quite similar to the purpose of meditation, namely, to fill up
some of the time between birth and death without doing anything and
therefore without creating any new karma.

> Compassionate listening, if we can call it that,  has to cut both ways
> or nothing gets sorted out.

A term that some people use is deep listening. Quakers have written some
interesting treatises on it. The only reference I can dig up at the
moment is Jim Pym's Listening to the Light. (Pym is a Quaker Pure Land
Buddhist.) His claim is that deep listening usually begins unilaterally.
One side simply decides to listen to the other, without argumentation
and without judgement. A person who has never been listened to is often
so transformed by the experience of actually being heard that they can't
help reciprocating. In my experience this really is a very powerful technique.

> Is there a buddhist term equivalent to schadenfreude ?

Taking pleasure at the misfortune of others is not normally considered
one of the Buddhist virtues. It corresponds to the vice known as
kraurya, which means cruelty or hard-heartedness. It obviously played a
significant role, along with greed, hatred and delusion, in guiding the
American people to choose a government that will savage them and betray
their values for another four years.

> You're not going to understand them if you fail to exercise
> discrimination and analysis when thinking about them. You won't
> understand them if simply demonize them.

No one has demonized anyone, Robin. What was said was that the people
who supported Bush are probably motivated by greed, hatred and delusion.
If one does not understand that, then one cannot even begin to
understand them. Of course just saying that these people are governed by
greed, hatred and delusion is not nearly specific enough. One must
understand what kind of greed, what kind of hatred and what kind of
delusion is driving them. There is a lot of work to do in discovering
more about the kleshas that are driving this sad and broken nation.

> Their government didn't "savage them and betray them."

I think you're wrong about this.  One is savaged and betrayed by anyone
who panders to one's weaknesses. People who feel so insecure about
themselves that they need to prevent other people from marrying whomever
they love are is serious need of healing. If one does not find a way to
heal them, one betrays them in a most savage way. Pandering to their
pettiness is not doing them any favors at all.

> So don't just sit back and call these people, whom you don't know and
> don't understand, these people that re-elected Bush, monsters.

No one has called anyone a monster. Although "monster" is not a bad word
for them. As you know, the word "monster" is derived from the Latin word
for one who gives us warning. I have heard the warning, and I will now
spend the next several years responding to it in various ways.

> They're real people with Buddhanature

I don't believe in Buddha nature, so here we part company.

> To try to understand them would, in my opinion, be the more
> Buddhist thing to do.

I could not agree more. Knowing exactly how they are deluded is the best
thing one can do for them. And one can do that only by listening. So I
strongly advocate listening to them just as I strongly advocate
listening to Osama bin Ladin. That's why I have my classes read the
writings of members of the Christian right, along with readings from the
liberal Christians, and writings of Osama bin Ladin. The work of healing
must begin with sympathetic listening.

> I think is U.S. who has declared war upon a lot of places in many
> ways. US has proven are more a threat to a lot of countries than the
> opposite.

This year I asked the students in my Reasoning and Critical Thinking
class to look up "terrorism" in the dictionary. The most commonly
encountered definition is "the use or threat of the use of violence as a
means of influencing policy." As a resident of a state that, if it were
an independent nation, would have the third largest nuclear arsenal in
the world, I cannot help acknowledging that my home and native land is
the single largest practitioner of terrorism in the world. A huge
nuclear arsenal, accompanied by a massive arsenal of biological weapons,
accompanied by a large standing army and navy with bases and fleets all
around the globe has enabled the United States to bully just about every
nation on this planet. If that is not terrorism, then terrorism simply
does not exist. And since practising Buddhism entails, I would argue,
offering an effective antidote to terrorism wherever one finds it, the
practice of combating terrorism for Buddhists in the United States must
start at home with combating the systematic use of violence and the
threat of violence by the government of the United States of America.

I personally have never encountered a more effective antidote to
terrorism of all kinds than a combination of critical thinking and
mettaa-bhaavanaa. Buddhists usually claim credit for mettaa-bhaavanaa
practice, but it can be found in just about every religious tradition in
some form or another.

> (pretending to be hopeful)

Keep pretending, Franz. As you know well, pretending is the mother of
realizing.

> First, I hope this reminds others, as it so powerfully reminds me,
> how astoundingly unreliable memory can be!

It all depends on what you are relying on memory to do, Franz. I find I
can usually rely on my memory to concoct elaborate stories out of very
spare material, and I can almost invariably rely on it to conceal from
awareness facts about my past that would embarrass my present ego in any
way. If one comes to appreciate memory for what it really is, a very
creative process of making sense of our present plight by assembling a
story out of carefully selected data from the past, then one can see it
is actually quite reliable. It's only when we foolishly believe that
memory dives into the archives and brings us back a straight and
unedited story about what happened in the past that we set ourselves up
for disappointment.

Arvind Sharma once observed that Buddhists and Hindus in India almost
never regarded memory as a reliable source of knowledge about anything.
Or at least I think he observed that. Let me put it this way: I remember
him observing that. Whether he ever actually said anything like that is
anyone's guess.

> If Arvind meant to suggest that contemporary Hindus and Buddhists in India
> regard memory as an unreliable source of knowledge, then I might be able to
> agree with him.  But if he meant to include traditional Vaidikas, whether
> contemporary or ancient, in this judgment, then I would not be able to agree
> with him at all.

As I recall, Arvind's observation had specifically to do with rebirth.
He wondered why classical Indians did not invoke memory of past lives as
a "proof" thereof.

> Among traditional Vaidikas accurate memory of traditional texts and rituals
> is an unquestioned and fundamental virtue.

Yes, but that is not an epistemological issue. As far as I know, most of
the schools of Indian philosophy rejected memory as a source of new
knowledge, because memory is merely the recollection of what is already
known. So having a good memory is no doubt a virtue, but it was not seen
as a source of new knowledge (pramaa.na).

> Poor Richard, the ex-communist who never met a tyranny he didn't like,
> has now become an apologist for a totalitarian political system
> dressed up as a religion whose tenets explicitly call for world
> domination.

I am not necessarily an ex-communist. If there were any reasonable
communist governments around today, I would be pleased to support them,
so long as they led by dharmic principles. But never have I approved of
any tyranny of any stripe, because I believe in both the principles of
Buddhism and the principles upon which the United States was founded. 

As you will know from reading the first few chapters of Land of No
Buddha, one of my lifelong heroes is Thomas Jefferson, in whose monument
in Washington are inscribed the words "I have sworn upon the altar of
God eternal hostility to every tyranny over the mind of man." It is
because I take those words very seriously (except for the unnecessary
reference to God) that I shall never rest as long as tyrants such as
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, and Donald Rumsfeld are in
positions of power in my home and native land. (Please pardon my
plagiarizing a wonderful line from the Canadian national anthem.)

> You may have forgotten 9/11 but I have not.

No, I have not forgotten it. Nor have I forgotten the many explanations
that have been given to us by the masterminds behind that event of why
it happened. My response to that event has been a Buddhist response,
informed entirely by my repeated reading of and reflection on the
chapter on anger in S'aantideva's Bodhicaryaavataara. I don't care much
for hysterical over-reaction, and that is mostly what I have seen from
Americans. Do I have compassion for the benighted Americans. Yes, of
course I do. Do I also have compassion for those who attacked the
Americans? Yes, of course I do. That is what is required of me by reason
and by the principles of Buddhism that I am sworn to uphold through my
going for refuge. 

You see, Mr Tilley, it is my belief that people do not go to the
extraordinarily lengths of planning a suicide attack against the
strongest military force in the world unless they are extremely
frustrated by something. When people are angry and frustrated, I try to
know why. I would much rather listen to an angry person and try to find
a way to neutralize that person's anger than to regard them as an enemy
who must be destroyed. Wishing to kill or destroy another person is the
action of an incompetent person who is lacking in imagination. A better
response, I think, is to listen carefully and to consider responding
creatively to what one has heard through that careful listening. So far,
I have seen no sign that either Bush or Kerry is ready to listen
carefully to Osama bin Laden. They are still pinning counterproductive
labels on him, such as "terrorist" and "fanatic" and "evil enemy of
freedom." Never have I seen a productive conversation ensue from the
conviction that one's partner in dialogue is evil or incapable of
reasonable negotiation. 

Osama bin Laden has said that if Americans would like to stop being
attacked, then they can achieve that goal by urging their elected
government to withdraw troops from Muslim lands. That does not sound to
me like the request of an evil fanatic. It sounds to me very similar to
what I would request if the army of any foreign land were occupying
Kansas or Colorado. You see, the Presidents Bush and President Clinton
all completely failed to practice the Buddhist exercise of exchanging
self with other and trying to see how it might feel to Saudis, Iraqis
and Syrians to have a substantial army from a foreign country parked in
or near their territory. The current President Bush either cannot or
will not acknowledge that he ordered the preemptive invasion of a
sovereign nation that had never even threatened to attack the United
States. He has not acknowledged that an estimated 100,000 Iraqis, many
of them women and children and elderly people, have died because he was
trying to bring "freedom" and his so-called "culture of life" to them.
He still doesn't understand that he has not at all achieved the goal of
"fighting the terrorists where they are rather than waiting for them to
attack us where we are." Rather, what he has achieved is to take
American men and women into lands where they are not welcome, thereby
making them much easier targets for the people who despise their
presence. Why would someone bother to attack America when they can so
easily attacks Americans who have obligingly been put into their very
neighborhoods? And why would anyone attack Americans if Americans stayed
at home and left others alone to rule themselves by their own laws and
customs? Who is attacking Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Holland,
Switzerland, Canada or any other of the countries that have far more
real freedom and well-being than America can now even dream of having? 

I have been very disappointed in John Kerry's recent posturing. He has a
beautiful record as a Senator and as a humanitarian, and I hate to see
him lower himself to the careless and unreflective rhetoric of his
opponents, who can talk only of killing the enemy. Killing an enemy, as
every Buddhist knows, is no solution. Helping an enemy get over his or
her enmity is the only Dharmic solution. And one cannot hope to do that
if one first labels someone as a "terrorist" and then issues the
unsubstantiated generalization that "There is no negotiating with a
terrorist." Given that the Republican Party Platform for 2004 says
exactly that (yes, I have read and studied the entire platform of both
the Republican and Democratic parties), I do not see any hope that the
Republicans, if they either get elected or somehow finesse a
pseudo-election, offer any hope at all to Americans who do not wish to
see America experience another September 11, 2001. I also do not see
much evidence that the Democrats will offer a creative solution, except
that Kerry is a man of deep convictions and excellent character who has
consistently spoken out against reckless use of military force. I think
there is a chance that he might be more responsive to the kind of gentle
persuasion (if I may borrow a Quaker phrase) that we Buddhists would
address to him.

> an interesting article about Bamiyan and the Buddhas.

Yes, it was an interesting article. Thank you for sending it.

Not long ago there was a television program on some of the archaeological
remains of some of the native peoples of New Mexico. Part of the program
was an interview with a native elder, who seemed a little puzzled by the
efforts of archaeologists to preserve the remains of buildings abandoned
hundreds of years ago. "We build things in such a way that they perish
when they are no longer used," he said. "Some of our ancestors forgot
this principle, and they tried to make buildings that would last
forever. That was their mistake. I don't see why we should be interested
in preserving their mistake rather than honoring the success of many
generations of people who made things that properly returned to the
earth when they were no longer needed."

That native elder expressed beautifully the way I felt about the Bamiyan
Buddha figures when they were destroyed. They had not been used for a
long time, and there was no reason to keep them around. Why preserve
monuments to the man who taught us that everything is impermanent?

> And to build or not build that is the question that seems to
> be on the top of everyone's mind now.

The only question on my mind is why that is a question in anyone's mind.
They are gone now, just as the people who once used them are gone. Let
them remain gone. We will join them soon enough. Meanwhile, if there is
money to spare for such projects, let it be given instead to living
people who have bellies to feed and minds to educate.

>  I agree strongly with this idea, but if Buddhists like us are not out of
> the mainstream, then we are, at least, out of the majority.

This is an empirical question and so should, in principle at least, be
decidable. It raises the interesting question of the demographics of
Western Buddhism. The only study I have seen is based on a questionable
methodology. It states that there are more doctorates per capita in
American Buddhism than in any other American religion. Of course, this
requires defining American Buddhism in such a way that it excludes most
Asian immigrants who brought their Buddhism with them. The study seems
to be talking mostly about American converts to Buddhism. The same
study, incidentally, shows that only 4% of American Buddhists are
registered Republicans, while 9% are registered Greens and the vast
majority registered Democrats.

> While many Buddhists still pay lip service to the notion of the
> compatibility of Buddhism and science, they tend to treat science just
> as the Christians do: something to take seriously only when it
> supports their myth-system.

Whatever the demographic makeup of Buddhism in the West, what you say
here rings true. It is certainly consistent with my impressions. Indeed,
we have had, over the years, some pretty lively exchanges on how
seriously Buddhists should take scientific findings that might challenge
their faith in rebirth. For many, but by no means all, Buddhists, the
meditation-cushion trumps the laboratory every time, and the guru
certainly trumps the scientist. But whether this is true of a majority
of Western Buddhists, I am unprepared to say. I'd like to believe the
likes of you and me may actually be in the majority. But rarely is what
I would like to believe actually true.

> So, far from wondering why more Buddhists aren't fighting the
> creationists, I am largely grateful that they haven't launched their
> own jihad against Darwin.

I don't think Darwin is perceived as the enemy as much as Francis Crick
and other advocates of physicalism are.

> What kinds of responses to your paper were offered during the discussion 
> (I assume there was some discussion going on) about pluralism?

There was no discussion whatsoever of my presentation, except by the
designated discussant, who said he agreed with everything I said and
then added a few more points of his own. My paper was the last of the
morning session, and the other presenters all went over time, so I had
to cut out about half my paper. Right after the designated discussant
gave his truncated reaction, the moderator declared the session closed.

After the presentation, several Christians approached me and
congratulated me for having the courage to say things that needed to be
said. A couple of Sikhs and Muslims and a Hindu also said they liked
what I had said. Three Jewish representatives all told me they thought
my remarks were quite out of place and were inexcusably inflammatory.
One of them called it a hateful diatribe. (Cripes, is there any OTHER
way to talk about Republicans?)

> What sort of responses came from Buddhists who were present?

Five Buddhists approached me afterwards and said they appreciated what I
had said. Of course, four of them were my former students, so their
comments probably don't count.

> Did the separation of religion and state get discussed at all in the context
> of "Justice and Universality," as the conference title proclaims? Did this
> conference reach any consensus on its goals?

There was very little substantial discussion of any kind. It was the
sort of conference in which everyone (but me) was so intent on not
offending anyone that almost nothing of consequence was said. Behind the
scenes a number of people grumbled about the fact that everyone was
being "nicey nicey" and that no hard questions were asked about such
things as caste in Sikhism, the treatment of women in Sikh culture and
so forth. These questions were hinted at, but were quickly answered with
the usual platitudes about Guru Nanak being the first feminist, and
pronouncements about how all people are completely equal in the eyes of
God (and therefore in the eyes of all God-loving human beings).

If an interfaith dialogue does not result in at least a few fat lips,
bloody noses and punctured egos, I reckon no one has been speaking the
truth about how they really feel. But then I belong to the old-fashioned
school of thought that says nothing changes for the better until people
start admitting that things are not already perfect.

> Is it fair that I am reluctant to think about the relationship of
> Buddhism to "Hinduism"?

I'm not sure how much a role fairness plays in all this. It is worth
bearing in mind, however, that when Buddhists distinguish themselves
from Brahmans, they are still defining themselves with reference to
Brahmans and so are still being strongly influenced by them. There is no
doubt that Buddhists borrowed quite a lot from Brahmans and then went to
some lengths to conceal the extent of their debt. And this, I would
submit, amounts either to intellectual dishonesty or to a lack of
self-awareness on the part of the polemicists.

In East Asia the pattern of deception continues as Buddhists borrow from
Chinese religions (Daoism and Confucianism) and then try to conceal
their debt. And in the West, the presentation of Buddhism to Westerners
borrows heavily from the liberalism of the European Enlightenment and,
to a lesser extent, from Stoicism and is often accompanied by attempts
to conceal that debt.

Don't get me wrong. Buddhists are no worse than anyone else on this
score. It's just that it would be foolish to believe that Buddhists are
any better than anyone else on this score. Myself, I prefer not to keep
score.

> Now, more and more 'discoveries' are leading to buddhism's origin in
> hinduism and it seems to become tougher and tougher to grant buddhism an
> independent identity with regard to hinduism.

Just to begin by picking some nit, I prefer to reserve the term Hinduism
for Indian religion as it was when the Arabs first pinned the label
"Hindu" on the non-Muslim religions in southeast Asia east of the Indus
valley. The term, as you know, also applied to Buddhism and Jainism.

All these religions evolved in interaction with one another. What we now
call Hinduism took the shape it took because of a variety of factors,
among them being Buddhism and Jainism. And Buddhism obviously took the
shape it took because of the heavy influence of Jainism and Brahmanism.
Only someone completely ignorant of Indian history would deny that.
Trying to sort out anything that is uniquely or exclusively or purely
Buddhist, without any traces of Brahmanism or Jainism, is the task of a
fool. Leave that sort of thing to fundamentalists.

> I was wondering, how do you buddhist academics, or academic buddhists, deal
> with the issue in theory and in practice?

I haven't done any new work in Buddhist studies for about fifteen years
now, so I can't really address the academic issues. As a practitioner, I
couldn't care less about the origins of anything I find useful. I
practice what works for me and disregard the rest, and I don't give a
damn who gets credit for being the source of what I practice. Given my
limited imagination, I can't imagine anyone having any different
attitude that that.

> Many terms were originally used to draw invidious distinctions between
> two systems: capitalism versus socialism, allopathy versus homeopathy,
> and Hinayana versus Mahayana.

I'm not sure that is true. As has been pointed out, the term hinayana is
used in Theravada to refer to self-centered practice. It can be a very
useful term if one uses it to reflect on one's own practice. It is very
useful to ask oneself "Is mine a hinayana practice today?" The only time
it becomes worse than useless is when it is applied to an entire system
of school, or to another person.

> My point was merely that there's nothing inherently offensive about any
> term and the reasons given why Hinayana is inherently offensive fail to
> convince me.

That's obvious, you stupid nitwit. (No offense.)

>  "Nigger" is regarded as an offensive term only because people agree
> to be offended by it.

No, you pea-brained idiot, a term is offensive only because people mean
to denigrate others when they use it. That is precisely why the term
"hinayana" was coined, to denigrate others. So it has a history of being
used in that way, and it's not easy to ignore that history. So you see,
you son of a bitch, that there may be more to this whole thing than one
person choosing to get offended. I doubt that an addle-pated retard like
you would be able to understand this, but some of our brighter readers
will know what I'm saying.

> I agree that language should not be
> used hatefully and we should avoid giving offense to others where
> practical, but I don't view any of this as more than arbitrary social
> custom.

No one has ever suggested otherwise. Social customs, like all other
things, are something of which we should strive to be mindful.

> *In that system* the hinayana
> approach is contrasted with the mahayana, and shown (rightly, I would
> contend) to be good but inferior to the mahayana.

Well said, Alex. I would only wish to add the historical point that
there never were any hiinayaana Buddhists. It is a purely fictional
category used for rhetorical effect to encourage people not to
misconstrue Buddhist teachings. It is a bit like using some expression
such as "inferior Buddhists" as a label for those who misunderstand the
implications of Buddhist teachings. One would think it rather odd if
someone read a text full of warnings about "inferior Buddhists" and then
went out in search of a school of Buddhism known as the Inferiorists.

> 4) The "people" still substitue the word "Theravada" for "hinayana",
> arguing that Theravada is inferior to mahayana, and thereby making
> *exactly* the mistake the word-swap was supposed to avoid.

Very nice analysis. I recall the observation being made on buddha-l in
past years that an operational definition of a hinayana Buddhist is a
Buddhist who calls any other Buddhist a hinayana Buddhist.

> Do you know what Buddha specifically said about how to help yourself
> to heal from a sickness? (when this is possible of course), something
> else that not grasping on it?

A friend of mine who was a disciple of the late Achaan Chah, reported
that when a monk got sick, Achaan Chah said something like this: "Once
when a monk was sick, he went to the Buddha for a prognosis. The Buddha
said `When you become ill, one of two things will happen; you'll get
better or you'll get worse. If you get worse, one of two things will
happen: you'll die or you'll get better.'"

I have never found any passage like that in the Pali canon, and I have
no idea why I like the story so much. I suspect I admire its simplicity,
its total lack of nonsense and the Buddha's admirable restraint from
offering false hope and unfulfillable promises.

> This is an example of new converts trying to be "more catholic than
> the Pope", and carrying over notions from their previous religious
> environment (probably Christian, in however vague a sense)
> into their new one.

I don't think anyone really converts to anything. What people do is find
ways of deluding themselves into thinking they have improved. (Hell,
even the Buddha was not immune to that delusion.) The most refreshing
people to me are the ones who are honest enough to admit that they have
not really become Buddhist at all but rather have simply given the name
"Buddhism" to all the sorry and destructive prejudices that have been
driving them their entire lives.

> Maybe the children can teach us a few things, it's quite
> possible we're all lost in thought and understanding.

There is no such thing as being lost in thought. One gets lost only when
one fails to think clearly and refuses to understand. According to the
most recent polls, about half the nation in which I live is in that
pathetic condition.

>An article in the HonoluluAdvertiser.com reports that some
>Hawai'i Buddhists protest naming a bar the ``Buddha Bar.''

Alliteration drives some people nuts. They would probably prefer something
like the Buddha Tavern (but NOT, for obvious reasons, the Tathagata Tavern)
or the Buddha Saloon (but NOT the Siddhartha Saloon).

But aside from the potentially ugly alliteration issue, which is easily
rectified, I honestly can't see what all the fuss is about. Don't Hawaiians
have anything better to worry about than what people call bars?

I'd say more, but I'm late for my dinner reservation at the Christ 
Cafe.

> I seem to remember that in his thin book on Paticca-Samuppada, Ven.
> Buddhadasa Bhikkhu also took the position of Ven. Nanavira that the
> traditional 3-life interpretation of the PS is incorrect. I wonder how
> prevalent is this contrarian view.

The history of the United States for the past 175 years has pretty much
discouraged me from putting much confidence in the views of the
majority. So rather than asking whether the contrarian view is
prevalent, I'd rather ask whether it makes sense. My own view is that
the contrarian view does make sense for the simple reason that the
traditional 3-life interpretation does not make sense, at least from the
perspective of dependent origination, which is said by many (including
the Buddha) to be the central doctrine of the Buddha-dharma.

A key principle in dependent origination is that nothing has a single
cause, and nothing has a single effect. That is to say, each event has a
great multiplicity of causes and an equally great multiplicity of
effects. Now what we call a single life (whether that of a human being
or that of a rhinoceros) is a series of events, each of which has many
causes and many effects. Among those events are numerous deliberate
actions. A single action, let alone a series of actions, influences
countless beings, each of whom can be said to be the direct effect of
the action. To say of a deliberate action that it is causally
efficacious in only one continuum of events is to ignore the principle
that every event has countless effects.

The three-life model is unacceptably simplistic. According to that
model, when someone (let's call him George W. Bush) tells a big lie,
then when he dies, some poor sucker gets born in hell or perhaps some
animal realm who experiences the consequences of that big lie. But
that's not how things really work. The way things work is that when
George W. Bush tells a big lie, we ALL experience the consequences of
that lie. We are ALL diminished by it. We ALL end up descending into a
hell realm to at least some extent every time any living being performs
any unskillful action. The three=life model gives insufficient attention
to just how widespread and long-lasting the effects of actions are. It
fails to show the extent to which we are all in this mess together. It
fails to show that none of us can get out of the mess unless we help
others out of it.

The three-life doctrine is perhaps a model by which a small child (or a
Republican) can be taught, because children (and Republicans) are
notoriously incapable of dealing with complexity. But the three-life
interpretation of dependent origination is, like the doctrine of
personal rebirth in general, not a doctrine that has any place in the
world of adults.

> Don't we need to focus the ontological discussion on the phenomenon that
> this applies to - i.e. water droplets etc., not 'rainbows'?

The word "phenomenon" means an appearance in awareness. A rainbow is a
phenomenon in that sense. The underlying causes of the phenomenon are
highly complex. For most Buddhists, who were far more interested in
phenomenology than in ontology, I should think that a rainbow would be
pretty much like any other display of colours. It is something to see,
therefore it is an item of awareness, and therefore it exists. As any
other existent thing, it has a plurality of conditions, and when the
conditions cease, so does the phenomenon. There is nothing special about
rainbows at all, from a classical Indian Buddhist perspective.

> It seems to me that the reason we use rainbows and reflections in
> debate is to bring out the ephemeral nature of that which appears
> substantial. And they can only do that because they are clearly
> insubstantial themselves.

I guess I don't know what you mean by "substantial". It sounds as though
you are equating the word with "eternal." But why do that? Surely one
can speak of temporary substances. A computer would be an example. (I
thought of that because I'm using one right now.) A person might be
another. (I thought of that because I happen to be one.) A computer is
built. Five minutes later it is obsolete. It eventually comes apart. A
person follows the same pattern. The entire world in which we live, it
seems to me, is made up of temporary substances.

> All of which goes back to Richard's speculations about what form the
> Sangha might take.

The only sangha that really matters is the one to which Buddhist go for
refuge, and that is the ariya-sangha, not the bhikkhu-sangha. The
ariya-sangha, of course, refers to those who have attained stream entry
or higher, whether they are monks or laity, whether they are Buddhist or
not. As long as those people are around, the dharma will thrive. In the
West, monasticism has long been considered a failed experiment. There
are very few people who have the calling to be monastics. Fortunately,
one need not be a monastic to be an excellent teacher and practitioner
and exemplar of the highest virtues of Buddhism.

My own feeling is that while the ariya-sangha is indispensable, the
bhikkhu-sangha is completely unnecessary for Buddhism in the West.
Indeed, I think beggary (like its first cousin buggery) sends an
entirely wrong message to people about the true meaning of Dharma.
Having said that, I hope that individuals who choose the mendicant life
will get respect commensurate with their actual virtue rather than being
either idolized or deprecated for the way they dress and put food into
their stomachs.

> "It's not the monk that I wai, it's the robes."  A long time ago a friend
> (and former monk) said this to me, and I've come to do the same.

I can think of nothing sillier than to respect robes. They're just
cloth, not even sentient beings. If one lives in an ideal Confucian
world, in which the rectification of names prevails, and therefore a
person wearing a monk's attire has an ideal monk's mentality and
demeanor, then there is no difference respecting an office and the
officer who holds it. But we live in a less than ideal world in which
not everyone who dresses a part plays the part well. In a world such as
this, I am inclined to recommend respecting the conduct and not the
cloth. If the conduct of an individual is not admirable, then there is
no point in admiring the individual simply because his or her conduct is
supposed to be admirable.

> There is, I think, something to be said for respect at the level of
> principles, but at the level of personalities it confuses me.

It's simple. If a person exemplifies the principles you respect, then
respect the person. If not, then don't.

> Besides, how could I accurately appraise the "actual virtue" of anyone?

Through observation of the person's conduct.

> So I guess that I disagree with Richard, though it's not 100% clear to
> me what he said.

Thank you for disagreeing. It has given me an opportunity to try to
express myself my clearly. If you disagree even more with my clarified
point of view, then no harm done. You go ahead respecting robes, and
I'll go ahead respecting people. And perhaps we shall meet someday at
the point where we both give respect to every being without conditions.

> So do you think the sangha itself has contributed to
> the longevity of the dhamma?  Or do you think the
> dhamma has been affected more negatively by the
> sangha?

The dhamma cannot be damaged or helped by anything at all.

>   As to whether celibacy is a virtue - did anyone ever say it was a
> virtue?

That is not an entirely straightforward matter. Is there any word in
Sanskrit or Pali that corresponds exactly to the Latin 'virtus'
(manliness, strength)? I suppose it could be argued that the Pali siila
(Skt "siila) comes close. Literally, of course, the term means habit or
characteristic, but its unmarked form presupposes good character. The
Buddha recommended sexual abstinence and called it an aspect of good
character.

> Nonattachment is a virtue.

In Buddhist terms, nonattachment is a prophylactic. It prevents disease
(dukkha). That does not necessarily make it a virtue. Being a measure 
to ward off dukkha makes nonattachment prudential, but not virtuous.

> Restraint is virtuous.

I suppose that depends on what is being restrained. Restraint from
voting for George W. Bush is a virtue. Restraint from eating vegetables
may not be.

> Celibacy is the removal of a whole family of distractions

So it was believed before the discovery of depth psychology and the
phenomenon of repression.

> For all I know "emptiness" is a bad translation into English of a word
> that has a much more complex meaning than the accepted standard meaning
> in English.

As it happens, I am in the middle of a most stimulating set of seminars
on this very topic at this years Seminars on Buddhism at Bodhi Manda Zen
Center in Jemez Springs, NM. For the past week Jay Garfield and Geshe
Samten have been giving some extraordinarily good (and very
entertaining) lectures on emptiness.

"Emptiness" is an almost perfect translation of a Sanskrit (and Tibetan)
term. As Garfield points out, emptiness is a relational term. Emtpiness
cannot possibly be absolute. One must specify what is empty of what. The
short answer is that everything is empty of independence. Everything is
dependent on causes and conditions and so is impermanent.

The most serious mistake one can make, say Garfield and Samten, is to
think that emptiness means non-existent or unreal or illusory.

> It seems to me that how emptiness is actually experienced
> is as the lack of permanence.

Yes, and and therefore as a lack of lasting worth. One of the most
important connotations of the Sanskrit counterpart of "empty" is
"worthless".

> Thus, it seems, the world, as we are able to sense it, spends most of
> its time being something to expect in the future or something to
> remember from the past. Hence the objects of this world, having no
> permanent existence for us, are empty.

Yes, very well said.

> So, it would seem, "emptiness" should not be used to mean that the
> external world lacks substance. It has plenty of substance, and the
> substance is pretty well understood by means of science.

Yes, science is excellent at uncovering causes and conditions. The more
we know about the causes and conditions of a given phenomenon, the more
we understand the particularity of that phenomenon's emptiness.

> So, "emptiness", as Vicent seems to be using it, appears to be overly
> broad and general, and he can use it to deny "reality".

Everything I have read by Vicente on emptiness suggests to me that he
has a very poor grasp of the topic. Probably he has not had the causes
and conditions necessary to give him a clear understanding of the topic.
Fortunately, causes and conditions are always changing, so there is
still hope for our friend Vicente.

>    What is the etymology of the word "bhikshu" (bhikkhu)? Does this
>    term have only a Buddhist scope?

It is an adjective formed from a desiderative verb, the full meaning of
which is "wish to share." In all Indian contexts the term signifies a
beggar of any kind. A homeless person who begs on the streets is a
bkikshu, and so is someone who voluntarily takes on a life begging for
alms.

Dr. Ambedkar often referred to the bhikshu-sangha as a gang of idlers.
This was a somewhat pointed but quite legitimate translation of the the
expression; a bhikshu is a beggar who does not work for a livelihood,
and a sangha is any team, group, society, social club or gang.

> The only way I've seen the Sanskrit kicikitsaa rendered in Tibetan
> is with "the tshom".

"The tshom" is the translation of both "vicikiitsaa" and "sa.ms'aya".
The former Sanskrit term signifies an unwillingness to think about
something, while the latter term signifies an inability to reach a
decision on the basis of all evidence available to one. This important
distinction is blurred in Tibetan, which renders these two different
concepts by a single expression. That could be why Tibetan Buddhism has
remained so retarded in relation to the other forms of Buddhism.

> "the tshom" is considered in Tibetan teachings
> to be one of the six root kleshas, marked by a vacillation between
> two possible views; rather like what Sen. John Kerry seems to
> experience on just about every issue he's confronted with.

That is precisely why I admire Kerry. He changes his mind when new
evidence comes in. He reconsiders positions. He learns from his
mistakes. I cannot think of any characteristic I would rather see in a
politician, a professor or a preacher. Sadly, the ability to reconsider
one's position and see things anew is rare in all three of those
professions.

> I think that in this real world of ours we *do* need a doctrine of
> just war

There are already several available. Catholic theologians have had such
doctrines since the time of Augustine of Hippo. There are doctrines of
just war embedded in the charters of the United Nations. I have been at
interdisciplinary forums at which there have been analyses of various
military actions that the United States has been involved in. I have
seen people discuss the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War in the
early 1990s and invasion of Iraq in 2003 by applying Saint Augustine's,
Saint Thomas Aquinas's and the United Nations' doctrines of justified
warfare. Every one of those military actions has failed all three of
those tests. It turns out that the United States of America has been the
worst outlaw of the past fifty years, at least by the most commonly
accepted criteria, although Israel gets at least dishonourable mention. 

I am not sure that the world needs yet another doctrine of just war from
Buddhists. It may well be that Buddhists could benefit by reflecting on
attempts others have made to come up with a doctrine of just war. 

There have been opponents to the doctrine of just war, of course. Some
have argued that no war is ever justified. Quite a few Christians and
Buddhists have taken such positions. Other have taken the "Realpolitik"
position that war is never a moral issue at all, so there can be no such
thing as a distinction between justified and unjustified war; at best,
there may be a distinction between prudent an imprudent war. A war would
be imprudent if its consequences turned out to endanger the well-being
of the state who engages in it. 

There are several good articles on war and pacifism in the Routledge
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. That is a good place to start, since the
articles have numerous annotated references to further readings.

> Paul Fleischcman is a psychiatrist and pretty smart guy

I have seen him speak. He is a pleasant fellow and a rather dogmatic
"true-believer" in the ways of Goenka. I was not at all impressed by his
command of Buddhism, but then I'm sure he would not be at all impressed
by my command of psychiatry. I am underwhelmed by his contention that
Buddhism teaches nonviolence but not pacifism. It is inconceivable to me
to have nonviolence without pacifism. But perhaps I am betraying my
Quaker biases.

> These are bullshit times for much of the world.

Bullshit is excellent for gardens. But I can't help wondering, where
have all the flowers gone.

> The Buddha taught the ten non-virtues without claiming they were
> objective, but they were nevertheless appropriate.

In all the passages I have seen in which conduct (siila) is discussed,
the Buddha is content to give them as descriptions of how he and his
followers behave. The implication is that acting in harmless ways is a
good way to be contented. This is quite a bit different from offering
commandments, or even precepts. When someone says "This is what I do,
and I am happy," it is an invitation to others to figure out what makes
them happy. The whole notion of normativity and "oughtness" is
refreshingly absent.

Applying this to the Victoria's Secret issue, it seems inappropriate to
me to say something like "Those swimming suits make me uncomfortable,
therefore they are wicked" or "Those swimsuits distract me, therefore
they are distracting." More appropriate might be to say something like
"I am perturbed, therefore I still have work to do."

> BTW, are Western Buddhists reading a Gandhian absolutism into the Buddhist
> tradition of opposition to violence that wasn't there before? 

David R. Loy, in his essay "Zen and the Art of War" (in his book
The Great Awakening), quotes an observation made by Paul
Demiéville: "The Hinayana, which tends to condemn life, has remained
strict in the prohibition of killing; and it is the Mahayana, which
extols life, that has ended up finding excuses for killing and even for
its glorification." 

The topic of war and its possible justifications has come up many times
in the history of BUDDHA-L. My observation has been that what Professor
Demiéville observed tends to be borne out. 

As you know, I have always taken pretty much an absolute position with
respect to non-violence. I have yet to encounter any situation in all of
human history in which a violent response seemed the best one to take. I
did not get this from Gandhi. I got it from my own disgust and revulsion
with regard to violence and all the obvious and more subtle negative
effects that violence has on those who participate in it, whether as
victims or a willing or unwilling perpetrators. In my own mind, which is
always subject to revision, my distaste for violence requires no
justification, but it is commensurate with how I understand the first
precept and the notion of bodhicitta. 

> "However, Gandhi's pacifism can be separated to some extent from his other
> teachings. Its motive was religious, but he claimed also for it that it
> was a definitive technique, a method, capable of producing desired
> political results. Gandhi's attitude was not that of most Western
> pacifists.

That's quite true. Gandhi provoked others to attack him so tht he could
take the moral high ground. It is a classic example of what George
Vaillant called passive aggression. But passive aggression is still
aggression, so I would condemn Gandhi's tactics altogether. They are not
pacifism at all, and therefore they fall far short of the Buddhist
standard. That is why I consider myself a Buddhist rather than a
Gandhian. 

> Gandhi objected to "passive resistance" as a translation of
> Satyagraha: in Gujarati, it seems, the word means "firmness in the truth."

When one thinks of all the things done in this dreary world by people
who had a firm grip on Truth, it makes you want to hide.

> Even after he had completely abjured violence he was honest
> enough to see that in war it is usually necessary to take sides.

Again, I fear Gandhi falls far short of Buddhist principles. Thanks for
citing this. It reminds me why throughout my lifetime I have had so
little respect for Gandhi's methods.

> he could not - take the sterile and dishonest line
> of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it
> makes no difference who wins.

What is sterile and dishonest about noting that in wars both sides take
lives, maim bodies and leave them physically and psychologically damaged
for the rest of their lives, destroy property and disrupt the
environment? I am inclined to agree with Kofi Annan's recent statement
that responding to violence with violence never works and that it is now
time for people who oppose violence to speak up and be heard. 

> Just for clarification then, is it in keeping with your tastes to put an
> image of the Buddha over an orifice out of which issues waste matter?

I do not consider anything that comes out of the human body to be
wasted. It all returns to nourish the earth. To superimpose such
categories as "impure" upon that which makes one feel a little squeamish
is just the sort of dualism that Buddhism regards delusion. So if you
regard some part of the human body as impure, I recommend that that is
precisely where a Buddha image should go, at least until the dualism is
cured. 

For myself, there is nowhere I would not put a Buddha image, except
perhaps in a state-supported school in my country, where no religious
imagery of any kind should be found. 

> Richard, so what would you do with all the coca-cola
> machines, the "icons" of american culture, in the
> schools?

Isn't it awful how Coca-cola has invaded schools and universities? Look,
if I had my way, there is no doubt that I would remove all items of
worship from public schools. American flags would be the first to go.
They do more to poison the minds of impressionable young people than
anything I can think of. Some people are in favor of taking the words
"under God" out of the pledge of allegiance. I am in favor of abolishing
the entire pledge, and the flag itself, from public schools. I am also
strongly opposed to printing religious mantras such as "In God we trust"
on the money.

> Schools are making money keeping these coolers in their halls, but
> increasingly in Canada, they are being asked to stock them with
> healthier beverages.

Such as Dassani water? Coca-cola learned some time ago that not everyone
wants to put sixteen teaspoons of sugar into their system, so they
started bottling tap water and selling it for $1.50 a pop. I reckon if
people are dumb enough to buy bottled water, they can only be seen as
evidence for such wise sayings as "There's a fool born every minute" and
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American
people." 

Let's look at this whole thing from a Buddhist perspective. Americans,
like everyone else, have no self. And, like everyone else, they are
terrified of knowing this simple reality, so they seek ways to avoid
knowing it. Americans have spent the past couple of centuries trying to
fill the bottomless void that is the absence of self with patriotism and
shopping. Shopping makes people belief for a few microseconds that they
have individual selves, and patriotism makes them believe they have a
place in a community. But both strategies fail to bring satisfaction, so
Americans seek even more. The result is that they are addicted to
consumerism and patriotism. To keep patriotism at a fever pitch, they
constantly seek wars to fight so that they can believe they have a
meaningful role to play. They love to believe that their young men and
women and dying to protect freedom. As the addiction gets worse, the
delusion deepens, and they share their dukkha with the entire world.
That is the American form of daana. Giving dukkha to everyone, whether
they ask for it or not.

> I agree that you are both being authentic to your own tastes,
> but I think the ability to distinguish virtue from non-virtue,
> the wholesome from the unwholesome, and meritorious action from
> action lacking in merit, is not a matter of taste.

Really? You think these things are objective? You think we just discover
them as facts about the world in about the same way we discover that
sunflowers are yellow? 

The way I look at it, the category "wholesome" (kusala, which also means
healthy and competent) just means that which conduces to the cessation
of dukkha. Surely this cannot be an absolute category, because not
everyone requires the same antidotes to dukkha. This is why there are so
many kinds of dharma practice. As I see Buddhism, it is an invitation
extended to individuals to discover for themselves what causes dukkha
for them and then to figure out what they must do to eradicate it. It is
very much a matter of individual discovery and thus is quite a bit
different from the discovery of more public events, such as the color of
a sunflower. This is what I mean by taste. We each have different
tastes, because we have different constitutions and therefore we each
require somewhat different paths. 

In addition to "kusala" and "akusala" we have such categories in
Buddhism as punya (benefit, often translated as merit) and paapa (harm,
sometimes translated as sin). These categories, according to Vasubandhu,
are entirely subjective, because they arise only when one is holding on
to a false view of self. Once one has broken through the delusion of
self, no actions can be seen as punya, because that category relates to
one's own personal desires for well-being. Once one looks at something
like paapa (harm) from an unselfish perspective, it is immediately
obvious that what is harmful to some is beneficial to others. Blowing up
Iraqis may be beneficial to American-based oil companies, but it does
not do much good to the Iraqis who get blown up. Deposing Saddam may
have made George W. Bush feel good, but it has not done much good for
Iraq or anyone else in the world. So one man's punya is another man's
paapa. But we are talking here only of selfish men. If we become
liberated from the prison of self, then those categories disappear
altogether. That is why I say that virtue and vice are matters of taste;
from a Buddhist perspective, they are equally matters of bad taste, in
that they are both based on defective understanding of the ways things
are. 

> Whereas it seems to me that indifference makes more sense, pragmatically
> anyway, as the near enemy of mettaa.

Indifference is usually seen as the near enemy of equanimity. One
fancies oneself to be neutral and impartial when a better description
might be that one just cannot be bothered to get involved at all.

> If Al Quida wishes to kill everyone in the world who don't believe as they
> do and Buddhists believe in non-violence, wouldn't that lead to the
> extinction of Buddhists?

As far as I know, al-Qa'eda does not wish to kill everyone who does not
think as they do. What they want is for American troops to get out of
Saudi Arabia and Iraq and to stop using Muslim women as prostitutes. The
also would like to see an end to the flood of unwholesome influences
pouring into their part of the world from secular nations. All of their
wishes seem quite reasonable to me, although I am absolutely opposed to
their methods of achieving their goals. 

> Where does self defense come in?

There are many ways to defend oneself. One is to listen carefully to
people who are angry with you and accede to some of their demands. Very
few people in this world kill just because they like death. People kill
because they are angry. They are angry because they are afraid. People
who are afraid deserve compassion. So the best way to defend oneself
against frightened people is to stop terrifying him and to stop acting
in ways that they find threatening. This may begin with trying to
understand why the see us as terrorists. Simply labelling them as thugs,
terrorists and criminals will do nothing but dehumanize them further. It
does not address the brute fact that they attack us because they feel we
have already dehumanized them. To announce repeatedly that we intend to
hunt them all down and kill them or punish them is the worst possible
strategy. It is also the strategy condemned by almost all Buddhists. 

If you can show me a Buddhist who finds it acceptable to kill other
people, I will show you someone who does not know even the first things
about Buddhism. Let's defend ourself by all means, but let's not do so
by anti-Buddhist methods that end up increasing hatred and delusion. 

> But I would also accept that, for some individuals,
> vipassana or koan study could well be more effective and quicker than
> tantric practice.

You have evaded my question. My question was: "How could one possibly
know which method is more effective or swift?" What do you do, line
people up at the starting line, fire a pistol and see who gets to
nirvana first? Or do you have someone get to nirvana by one method,
carefully measuring the time it took, and then take that individual's
nirvana away and let him try again using a second method, again
carefully measuring the time? You see, I think the whole question of
effectiveness and swiftness is either a category mistake or a
pseudo-issue that results in claims that cannot possibly be either
verified or falsified. It is difficult to take such claims seriously. 

There is a principle in Ayurvedic medicine that people are almost always
attracted to the kinds of food that put their humours out of balance. I
have often thought the same might be true of contemplative practices,
namely, that most people tend to gravitate towards practices that
actually make them move away from their goals rather than closer to
them. My own experience has been that when I do the kinds of practice
that seem attractive to me, I tend to spin my wheels. But when I haved
tried things that do not appeal to me very much at all, I have felt that
I have made important steps forward. All this is purely subjective, of
course. It must be, of course, since the goals of religious practice are
not in any sense of the word objective.

>OK, but where is the line between triumphalism and simply taking the
>truth claims of one's religion seriously?

Triumphalism, as I understand it, consists taking the truth claims of
one's own religion as uniquely true, which entails regarding the truth
claims of other religions as automatically false. 

Sangharakshita has observed that each path (yaana) of Buddhism can
involve a triumphalist attitude. Theravada is triumphalist in claiming
that only its canon is legitimate, which entails discarding the Mahayana
and vajrayana texts as forgeries or apocrypha. Mahayana is triumphalist
in claiming to be great (mahant) and denigrating earlier Buddhism as
garbage (hiina). Vajrayana is triumphalist in claiming to be faster and
more efficient than the other paths. Sangharakshita argues that it is
not necessary to be triumphalist in following any of these paths. So
there is nothing inherently trimphalist in any path, but when one says
her own path is significantly superior to the others and when one
denigrates other paths, then one is entering into triumphalism. 

If one follows the Vatican II definition of triumphalism, then one is
being a triumphalist when he says that his own religion has been
successful in the secular sphere simply because it is morally or
doctrinally superior. If, for example, one were to argue that Jodo
Shinshu is the most popular religion in Japan because it is closer to
the truth than all other religions, then one would be making a
triumphalist claim. Or if one were to argue that Protestantism is
closest to the truth because it is the most popular religion in the most
powerful militry and economic empire in the world, then one would be
indulging in triumphalism. When Osama bin Laden claims that the collapse
of the twin towers of the world trade centre (when he was expecting only
the top stories to be damaged) is proof that God favors his campaign to
get Americans off the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, he is making a
triumphalist claim. What makes all those claims triumphalist is that
sole credit is being given to a particular religion for successes that
were probably due largely to non-religious factors. There may be other
ways to account for the popularity of Jodo Shinshu and Protestantism and
the collapse of the twin towers than the self-serving religious reasons
proferred. 

> I think it should be noted that not everyone shares the disdain for
> triumphalism expressed on this list.

Obviously not. No triumphalist will be content with a disdain for
triumphalism, just as no fundamentalist will be content with modernity.
It is precisely because there is an enormous rift between attitudes that
there is a name for the attitudes so opposed. 

As far as I have been told, the term "triumphalism" was coined by the
Second Vatican Council. A former priest who was heavily involved in the
reforms of Vatican Two explained to me that the term was used to refer
to the belief (rejected as false by Vatican II) that success in the
secular world is a reflection of spiritual success. In particular, the
view being rejected under the name "triumphalism" was the view that the
Roman Catholic Church expanded throughout the world purely because it
was in possession of the truth and that this truth triumphed over the
falsehood of other religions. The Catholic Church collectively realized
(some would say a little late) that its success had much more to do with
military and economic strength and with good old-fashioned imperialism
that with possession of the truth. 

This Vatican II rejection of triumphalism went hand in hand with the
doctrine known as "preferential option for the poor." What was
recognized, as I understand it, was that the Church had almost always
associated itself in the past with the wealthy and the powerful who were
preying upon the poor, whereas what it should have been doing was siding
with the poor in their struggle for survival in a world dominated by the
wealthy and powerful. 

The principal triumphalists I can think of these days live in and near
the White House, where one can routinely hear people saying that America
wins wars (such as its stunning victories in Vietnam and Iraq) because
God has chosen America to deliver the Almighty's gift of freedom to the
world. (Of course people are free to choose only the kind of freedom
that the new messengers of God approve of.) 

Yes, Bernie, triumphalism is alive and well in America. One need not
look very far to see it in abundance. It does not now surface much in
other countries, because other countries have been so thoroughly
dominated by the USA. When America falls, which it will soon enough, and
some other country (or international corporation) rises to replace it,
you can be sure there will be people in the new empire who will proclaim
that their victory was sure sign that God was on their side. 

>> Just out of curiosity, what is the word being translated as "logicians"
>> here?
>
> Taarkika.

I figured as much. I don't think the term ever means logician. It
refers, especially in Buddhist usage, to people who are content with
speculating about things that it is impossible to know. Alternatively,
it refers to someone who is content with a priori assumptions and
hearsay rather than direct experience. I know of no single English word
that captures all that, unless "speculator" or "dogmatist" would do it.

> Yes, I am also aware that the term has various meanings, but my
> feeling is that "logicker" (a la Staal) etc fits the overall context best
> for that and other occurences in the MVT and elsewhere which implies that
> some things, such as mantrayaana, are beyond the scope of reasoning

That depends entirely on what one means by being beyond the scope of
reasoning. The meaning of the phrase "beyond the scope of reasoning" is
not readily apparent to me. I can think of two ways that something could
be said to be beyond the scope of reasoning. Let me state what those two
ways are, and if there are others that have escaped my attention, then
perhaps you or someone else will let me know. 

First, it could be claimed that a proposition in question is not
knowable through reasoning alone. What I take this to mean is that
reasoning can provide nothing more than a range of possible answers to a
question, but cannot provide the exact answer without the help of
empirical investigations. On this view, reasoning can never add to our
knowledge, but it can subtract from our unwarranted opinions, or it can
at least reveal our views to be prejudices rather than principled
beliefs. Or, to use the Sanskrit terminology, reasoning cannot add to
our knowledge (pramaa.na), but it can subtract from our unwarranted
speculations (tarka). 

Second it could be claimed that the proposition in question cannot even
be tested by reasoning, or that even if the procedures of reasoning do
challenge it, the proposition is of such a nature that it automatically
survives the challenge. On this view, there may be some kinds of
revealed scriptures or extraordinary intuitions that are knowable as
true no matter what kinds of evidence one might bring up as possible
counterexamples to the claims they make. 

An example of someone who holds the first of these two claims is
Dignaaga, and one could add Dharmakiirti, Dharmottara and a score of
other commentators. For them, the teachings of the Buddha (or anyone
else) are propositions that need to be tested by our experience, and the
emphasis here is on OUR experience, for no individual's experience is
capable of establishing anything. It is only that which is commonly
experienced in the presence of a given set of conditions that can be
considered generally worthy of trust, and that can be worthy of trust
only so long as our collective experiences do not overthrow it. The only
thing one can do is to show that a set of doctrines are not unreasonable
and not in conflict with common experience. Showing that still does not
guarantee the truth of the doctrines under examination. It merely shows
that those doctrines have not been disqualified from being believed by
people who still have some claim on sanity. For the philosophers named
above, all the teachings of Buddhism, bar none, fall into this category
of claims that it is not unreasonable to believe but that still remain
defeasible through further investigation. 

An example of the second claim about being beyond the scope of reason
would be someone like Bhartrhari, who says that if there is a conflict
between personal experience and reason, then experience trumps reason,
and if there is a conflict between experience and scripture, then
scripture trumps experience. (Another example might be George W. Bush's
claim that invading Iraq was the right thing to do, whether or not his
declared reasons for making an illegal invasion of the country have been
borne out by subsequent experiences. The point, as Mr Bush told Bob
Woodward in an interview, is that the President knew in his heart that
God Almighty had appointed America to give the Almighty's gift of
freedom to the people of the Middle East; that 17,000 Iraqis have been
liberated from the sorrowful condition of being alive can only be seen
as evidence that God's reasons for doing things is not always apparent
to everyone. But they are apparently apparent to the burning Bush.) 

I trust even the most fanatical taantrika would not fall into the trap
of thinking that any claims are absolute rather than merely provisional.
I trust that the claim is not being made that there are some hypotheses
knowable through tantric practice that are immune to criticism and
correction or refinement.

> the contrast is between "tarka" and "adhimukti though you will
> probably chose a meaning that excludes a negative evaluation of your
> own predilections.

If you have some insight into what my own predilections are, please let
me know. On this sort of issue, as in almost all issues I can think of,
I think of myself (perhaps wrongly) as being a Maadhyamika. That is, I
am wary of all claims to certainty (nis"caya), for I have not yet found
any kind of claim to knowledge that is ultimately grounded in anything
more solid and reliable than wishful thinking and credulity. For me the
task of all practice, therefore, is to loosen the grip that theories
have on me, and especially to loosen the grip of those theories that
blind me to possibilities other than the ones I am already inclined to
accept. In other words, I am extremely suspicious of what the Buddhists
called tarka (dogmas, unexamined faith claims and untested
speculations). My reason for rejecting tarka is that I am concerned only
with adhimukti (being liberated from the prison of dogma). 

So you will have to tell me whether in saying all this I have confirmed
your dark and (to my mind) rather carelessly entertained suspicions of
my predilections. 

Now let me say something, I hope in the spirit of charity, about some
very silly things you have said recently, Stephen. I am willing to give
you the benefit of the doubt by operating on the hypothesis that you are
much too intelligent to believe that it REALLY matters whether one says
"huu.m" rather than "hung" and to believe that "hung" is REALLY quite
outside the range of acceptable pronunciations of "huu.m." I am assuming
you were just being swept away in a childish enthusiasm for pedanticism
and were just showing us that you are a great linguist and master of
details while other readers of BUDDHA-L are less accomplished in these
areas than yourself. In short, I assume you were just showing off and
thumping your intellectual chest, like a typical academic gorilla. Quite
understandable. Being a stuffy pedant is one of the hazards of being
knowledgeable. You are therefore forgiven your folly. Just be careful
not to repeat the offense. 

Please don't forget that this pardon of your otherwise unpardonable
behaviour comes from another who has frequently fallen into the folly of
intellectual ostentation. 

> As for the rest of your argument about the acceptability of phonological
> diversity, you may well be right but you no are longer, if you ever were,
> taking the tantras seriously in their own terms.

The issue here is whether the tantras deserve to be taken seriously in
their own terms. So far I have not seen any more reason to take them
seriously on their own terms than I have seen to take the Book of Mormon
seriously on its own terms. Now as you very well know, I am quite
willing to admit that tantric practice may have some efficacy. In fact,
I would be very surprised if it did not; it would not survice if it did
not have some efficacy. But *that* it has efficacy does not tell us *why* it
has efficacy. The tantras themselves may offer some explanations, but
there could very well be better explanations than the ones the tantras
offer. Exploring those other explanations does not, in my mind, amount
to failing to taking the tantras seriously. 

> It's an interesting phenomenon that in learning to speak another
> language one usually (but not necessarily) opts for the most clear and
> grammatically correct pronunciation.

This was not my experience teaching English in Japan for two years. I
found that people pronounced English words in whatever way they could.
Hardly anyone I met was able to come without shouting distance of either
one of the many British or one of the many North American accents. (One
of my classes had been taught by an Australian for two years; none of my
Japanese students had an Australian accent either.) So after being in
Japan for two years I concluded that the correct way to pronounce my
name in Japan is "Richaado Heizu." To have required any other
pronunciations of the Japanese would have been churlish. 

Speaking of pronunciation issues, I had Korean friend in Japan. He loved
to make fun of the Japanese pronunciations of English names. He said
Koreans pronounce English names quite perfectly, because Hangul is far
superior to and more scientific than the Japanese syllabary. To prove
his point, he snickeringly said that the Japanese say "makaassa,"
instead of the correct pronunciation "magadda." It took me several
moments to realize he was referring to General MacArthur.

> I believe that I have the basic concept of mindlessness down.  I will
> concentrate on the smell of in and put my mind 'somewhere else' and try not
> to think of anything.  If something distracting comes to mind I try to block
> it. Is this the right idea?

I would not recommend trying to block anything at all. The advice that
the Buddha gave was to give every sensation and thought just the amount
of attention required to note its presence and its eventual
disappearance. Give no sensation any more attention than that. Do not
try to hold on to any sensation or thought, and do not reject any
sensation or thought. Just note their coming and going.

> I think that people who don't bother to pronounce words properly (as
> well as they can) just fail to show proper respect to a culture 
> (their own or someone else's).

I am inclined to disagree. Some people have good ears for language and
some do not. I do not think there is any correlation at all between
respect and the ability to hear phonetic elements clearly and replicate
them accurately. When a Tibetan Buddhist says "peme" instead of "padme,"
is that a sure sign that the Tibetan has contempt for Indian culture? Or
when a Burmese says thiila instead of siila or thamaadhi instead of
samaadhi, does indicate a contempt for Pali? I rather doubt it. I also
rather doubt that the quality of a Burmese monk's samaadhi is inferior
on account of his "mispronunciation." (I put the word in scare quotes,
because I maintain that thiila is exactly the right way to pronounce
siila in Burma, although it is not how the same word would have been
pronounced in ancient India or in modern Sri Lanka or Thailand.)

Actually, this whole pronunciation question just makes me giggle. It's
hard for me to believe that people could get so exercised over phonetic
niceties. Far more alarming to me than the "decline" of pronunciation or
grammar ("decline" being the word that old farts give to what others are
content to called "change") is the loss of a commonly accepted database
of literary passages and other cultural artifacts that people can allude
to. 

I have been thinking about this a lot as a result of reading Hori's Zen
Sand, in which he makes a case for the view that koan study was not
particularly mysterious or paradoxical to people who knew enough
literary history to be able to catch most of the allusions to earlier
texts that are found in Ch'an/Zen talks and anecdotes. I find his
hypothesis that much of what went on in Zen was a rather sophisticated
form of literary gamesmanship rather appealing. That's an
oversimplification of his hypothesis, but it is a dimension of what he
says, and that dimension has made be acutely aware of how rarely it is
these days that one hears quotations of Shakespeare, Donne, Campion,
Shelly, Keats, Pope, Whitman, Emerson or Thoreau. 

Thinking about this general lack of cultural moorings reminds me, yet
again, of the concern that Carl G. Jung expressed some seventy years ago
when he expressed a worry that when European people convert to Asian
religions, they tend to forget the mythology and cultural anchors they
learned as children and never quite acquire all the mythology and
cultural anchors of the Asian religions to which they convert. I think
this is a real concern. If an American takes up Zen practice but never
learns much about Confucianism, Taoism, Chinese history, Chinese poetry,
Chinese art, Chinese mythology and Chinese music (let alone not learning
much about T'ien t'ai or San Lun or their Indian origins), then one can
only assume it is a pretty meager and impoverished Zen practice. And if
the preoccupation with Zen is accompanied by a general rejection of
Western literature, philosophy and art and the Christian foundations on
which most of it is based, then we have an almost perfectly uncivilized
person trying to take on a practice that is almost impossible to derive
much benefit from if one is not quite civilized and (dare I say it)
cultured. This concerns me immeasurably more than the fact that some
Americans don't mispronounce Sanskrit is exactly the same way that
Stephen Hodge mispronounces it.

> Besides it's simply not true that the shape of the mouth has much
> influence on pronounciation, babies spontaneous pronounce sounds of all
> languages.

If, however, a child has a hare lip or a cleft palate, her production of
sounds will be different from the sounds produced by other babies. The
length and thickness of the tongue, the condition of one's teeth, the
size and shape of one's lips all have a demonstrable effect on the kinds
of sounds one makes. And, of course, by the time a child reaches the age
of twelve or thirteen, the odds against being able to pronounce words
from any foreign language learned after that age increase dramatically.

> remember a discussion involving Chris Fynn a while back (not in this forum)
> where the Jungian archetype proponents maintained that deity visualisation
> is *all in the mind*. Chris pointed out that Tibetans insist that the
> deities are *real*.

For what it's worth, the Jungians I hang out with also insist that
things that are "all in the mind" are also quite real. So there is no
contradiction at all involved in saying, for example, "the mantra is
efficacious only because I believe it is efficacious" and "the mantra is
efficacious." That is, saying the former is not in any way denying the
latter; it is simply giving an hypothesis as to why the latter is true.
It just happens to turn out that this hypothesis has been accepted by
many Buddhists for a very long time, and rejected by many others. So no
matter which hypothesis one accepts, one is in very good company. 

The Jungian approach (also accepted by many Buddhists) would be to try
to accept one theory (say, the self-power view) without rejecting the
other (say, the other-power view). Some would even go so far as to say
that one should strive to accept the view that naturally feels more
alien to oneself. So if you naturally think mantras have innate power,
try seeing them as having only the power that your credulity gives them.
If you think mantras are naked emperors pretending to be wearing
splendid clothing, try seeing them as having an innate power that has
nothing to do with your perception of them. By striving to see the
merits of what feels alien, one achieves more balance and thereby enters
more fully into Buddha-nature, whatever the hell THAT is.

> Richard, as I do too, likes the Confucian rectification of names,
> though I think there is case for the rectification of pronunciation
> first. 

In principle I like the idea of rectification of anything that can be
rectified, but I don't think pronunciation falls into that category.
What is the right pronunciation of vocalic r in Sanskrit? What is the
right pronunciation of jñ in Sanskrit? Surely the answer to that, as
Patanjali pointed out some 2300 years ago, is that it depends on which
part of India one is in and even on how one's mouth is shaped, for the
architecture of one's teeth, tongue and palate determines which sounds
the mouth produces. Moreover, one's cultural and personal temperament
will influence the speed which which one talks, whether one projects the
voice from the throat or the chest and so on. So, argues Patanjali,
there is no single objectively correct standard by which to judge
whether Sanskrit pronunciation is correct. And if that is correct for
people in India, then it is reasonable to make similar allowances for
people in Tibet, China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, Spain, France, Germany,
Norway, England, Ireland, Scotland, and (perish the thought) EVEN
America! 

In China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan it is not uncommon to chant something
called (in English) the Great Compassion Dharani. It is supposedly a
phonetic rendering of a Sanskrit dharani, but I am fairly confident that
the average Bengali would not recognize the Vietnamese or Korean
chanting of the dharani as pukka Sanskrit. But for the Bengali to insist
that the Vietnamese are getting no benefit from the dharani because
their pronunciation is not rectified would (I hope) strike most of us as
risible, especially because a Maharashtrian or Keralan would not regard
the Bengali's pronunciation as pukka Sanskrit! 

> However, I don't know where that leaves most Tibetans, Mongolians, Chinese
> or Japanese, few of whom ever pronounce mantras correctly.

Yes, they do. I would argue that if they pronounce them within the
phonetic context of their own native languages, they are pronouncing
them exactly right. They are just not pronouncing them in quite the same
way a Gujarati, a Panjabi, a Scot or a Mexican would pronounce them.

> My various Tibetan and Japanese teachers acknowledge there is a problem here
> and say that the "correct" Sanskrit pronunciation is the most desirable,

Stephen, you need to fire your teachers and find someone who knows
Panini and Patanjali.

> Phew, now I feel much better having got all that off my chest.

Yes, the mantra "phew" has enormous chest-clearing powers, no matter how
one pronounces it. (Some say "hyuu" and others say "hwyuu." Only a few
say "phew.")

> Anathema to Theravada Buddhists for example?

An anathema, as I recall, is an ecclesiastic ban or curse that involves
excommunication, with the prospects of eternal damnation for the body so
cursed. I hardly think any Buddhists (with the possible exception of
some of the more extreme forms of Nichiren Buddhism) have gone quite
that far. 

It is true that Theravadin Buddhists held that all the teachings of the
Buddha were public and that he gave no teachings in secret and required
no special initiations of anyone to receive any teaching. But
Theravadins were not alone in that. Even such Mahayanins as Dharmakirti
seem to have held such a view. But even those who were most deeply
convinced that the Buddha never dispensed any secret teachings never
went further than repudiating those who said otherwise and suggesting
that the burden of proof was on them. I am aware of no excommunications
or condemnations to eternal hell. 

> Hey, whatever you and I agree on, suposing there is something, that's
> mainstream. What better test could there be?

Well, for starters, we have agreed to disagree on several issues, so I
suppose we could say that mainstream Buddhism consists in being
agreeably disagreeable. Perhaps we could even agree that an agreeable
way to disagree is to continue speaking kindly. A particularly good
expression of that is found in the writings of Dogen:

begin{quote}
 "Kind speech" means that when you see sentient beings you arouse the
 mind of compassion and offer words of loving care. It is contrary to
 cruel or violent speech.

 In the secular world, there is the custom of asking after someone's
 health. In Buddhism there is the phrase "Please treasure yourself"
 and the respectful address to seniors, "May I ask how you are?" It is
 kind speech to speak to sentient beings as you would to a baby.

 Praise those with virtue; pity those without it. If kind speech is
 offered, little by little virtue will grow. Thus even kind speech which
 is not ordinarily known or seen comes into being. You should be willing
 to practice it for this entire present life; do not give up, world after
 world, life after life. Kind speech is the basis for reconciling rulers
 and subduing enemies. Those who hear kind speech from you have a
 delighted expression and a joyful mind. Those who hear of your kind
 speech will be deeply touched---they will never forget it. 

 You should know that kind speech arises from kind mind, and kind mind
 from the seed of compassionate mind. You should ponder the fact that
 kind speech is not just praising the merit of others; it has the power
 to turn the destiny of the nation.
end{quote}

If you have grown as weary as I have of the ghastly negative campaign
ads that both the Republicans and the Democrats have been throwing our
way this election year, you might be particularly tempted to mumble
"Hear! Hear!" at the last line of the quotation.

> What exactly is meant by "non-dual meditation" and "non-conceptual
> meditation"

I have no idea what anyone else means by non-dual, but when I use the
term I used it in the sense that Hui-neng used it, namely, to refer to a
state of mind in which one is not feeling preferences. If you prefer a
more positive description, I would say it is a contemplative exercise in
which one is cultivating equanimity or impartiality. 

When I speak of "non-conceptual meditation" I am thinking of
contemplative exercises that are not focused primarily on propositional
thinking. As you know, many Buddhist meditative exercises are formulaic
and involve thinking about things such as death, the benefits of
friendship, the epithets of the Buddha and so on. Others involve
visualization in which propositions do not play an important part. Still
other forms of meditation consist of focusing attention on a single
object such as the breath; in them the principal object is not to arrive
at propositions of any sort.

> So could someone who has studied this tell us a bit about the
> dating of the manuscripts that are supposed to represent "early"
> buddhism?

When I first arrived at McGill, I inherited a course entitled "Early
Buddhism." The first thing I did was to change the title to "Theravada
Buddhist Literature." Years later, I read Steven Collins's article
called "The very idea of the Pali canon," which convinced me of the
folly of equating Pali with historical earliness. Yes, some Pali
literature is early, but some material preserved now only in Chinese may
be earlier. So the study of "early" Buddhism, aside from being
intolerably speculative and dogma-driven, also requires a huge amount of
knowledge of many languages, just to handle the textual side. But
studying from texts alone is hopelessly limiting. One must also look at
archaeological evidence. And if one is interested (as I am) in Buddhism
and philosophy rather than in archaeology, paleography, philology and
historiography, then doing all that legwork ends up being an enormous
distraction. 

> As for the historicity of the traditional claims, I don't see how
> anyone can do more than use their own judgement. After all, our history
> too is a species of fiction.

I agree. I think the distinction between history and myth is one of the
biggest myths in history. What I tend to prefer is whopping good
stories. A story is good, by my standards, if it makes me laugh or cry
or think.

> The absolute ridiculousness of line of reasoning is shown here possibly
> inadvertently by R. Hayes. It says that if a subject doesn't experience
> something it doesn't exist.

That's not quite the line of reasoning. As Dharmakiirti states it, an
object does not exist if all the conditions for experiencing it are
fulfilled but one still does not experience it. This important condition
rules out such things as insufficient lighting conditions, defective
sense organs or objects that are too small or too far away to see. 

> It is really nihilism at its worst.

No, there is nothing at all nihilistic about the claim. It's a rather
modest claim, really. All it says is that if kleshas were present, then
one would detect them. If one does not detect them, then they do not
exist. And since the definition of nirvana is klesha-nirodha, inferring
the absence of kleshas is inferring nirvana. And since nirvana is quite
a good thing, it can hardly be called nihilistic to say that one can
know it. 

> This leads to a very primitive definition of Nirvana

There is no need for anything more than a primitive definition if a
primitive definition will suffice. Since the standard definition of
nirvana as klesha-nirodha has worked for two and a half millennia, I see
no need to change it. 

>> There is, I think only one scientifically rigorous explanation of the
>> phenomenon of people believing that Jesus visited India: such people are
>> fools.
>
> I believe that ephors of Religious Studies actually frown on the use of
> this hypothesis because it can be invoked to explain oh so very much about
> religious phenomena, and that makes the game too easy.

I was simply trying to stick to the traditional Buddhist explanation,
which has always worked for me. Everything can be explained by an appeal
to some combination of three forces: greed, hatred and delusion. While
these three forces are almost perfectly balanced in America, I think the
Jesus-in-Tibet hypothesis shows little evidence of either greed or
hatred. So I can only conclude it is approximately 100% delusion.

> Therefore, it would seem that mystical experience is not necessary,
> although many people have maintained that conceptual understanding is
> simply not enough to radically uproot ignorance.

It is a well-known fallacy to appeal to what many people maintain.
Please recall the Buddha's observation that most people believe they
have an enduring self. Indeed, one of the principal doctrines of
Buddhism is that most people are wrong in what they believe about what
is necessary to achieve liberation from the afflictions. He also said
that one of the ways to achieve liberation is through what he called
"dry insight," which consisted of thinking things through without ever
attaining dhyaana. I have a hunch he was right, but of course I can't
know for sure, since I have spent quite a lot of time practicing the
dhyaanas, so I can never know on the basis of my own experience whether
I could have eliminated (or at least significantly reduced) various
afflictions without them.

> Hhmm.  So where do you suggest direct perceptions (pratyak.sa),
> non-conceptual by definition, occur ??

I think that arises from a false and unsupportable definition. As far as
I know, Dignaga was the first to state that definition, and plenty of
others showed that it cannot possibly be correct. So rather than
following a bad definition, I prefer to follow a way of looking at
things that makes sense. Hui-neng's notion of wuxin seems just about
perfect to me. If he is read with care, it is perfectly obvious that he
regards concepts to be the very nature of the mind. They become obstacle
only when one becomes attached to them. But if one "flows" with them,
taking them as heuristic and temporary, there is no problem. Hui-neng,
on this score, makes infinitely more sense to me than Dignaga and
Dharmakirti. 

> Is there any recent or less recent research on the shift from NirvaaNa as
> the destruction of desire to what could be called the "destruction" of
> thought, or the attempt thereof? And what could have influenced that shift?

I don't know what has been written about this so far, but I soon plan to
find out. My hunch is that the early Buddhist advice to cultivate
impartiality (upeksha) by avoiding preferences for comfort over
discomfort, praise over blame, luxury over poverty and so forth got out
of control. Encouraging upeksha often took the form of warning against
making distinctions in value. People were advised not to value praise
more than blame, for example. 

Eventually, I suspect, this advice not to prefer one thing to another
was absolutized. That is, preferring anything at all (such as charitable
actions) over anything else (such as heinous crimes) came to be seen as
making unwarranted distinctions. Eventually the feeling that one should
not make distinctions was moved out of the realm of values and into the
general realm of all consciousness. So that even to notice that one
thing was different from another came to be seen as an obstacle to
perfection. The result is a most ironic situation: a virulent dualism
consisting of the judgement that non-dualism is infinite better than
dualism. 

I think many teachers realized that Buddhism had fallen victim to a
"disease of language" of sorts. Here the disease was an overly
literalistic interpretation of the term "non-dual," which should have
been understood as non-preferential but had come to be understood as not
even apprehending distinctions at all. Hui-neng in the Platform Sutra of
the Sixth Patriarch makes the observation that the way to realize
perfection is to cultivate no-mind (wu hsin). He then quickly says that
one should not think this means that one goes around with a completely
empty mind, not noticing anything and not forming any thoughts. People
who think that's what wu-hsin means are dismissed as people so stupid
that one cannot even talk to them. He tehn says what he does mean by
wu-hsin. It comes very close to what we say in English as not minding.
It means not having preferences, not being attached, no rejecting things
(or people or ideas) just because one doesn't much like them. When one
can say "I don't mind whether it's hot or cold" - "I don't mind whether
people praise me or not" - "I don't mind whether people agree with me or
not" - then one is practicing no-mind. 

Stupid people (or at least the people whom Hui-neng characterized as
stupid) probably took this idea of wu-hsin or no-mind to mean not having
any thoughts. For these idiots, who obviously weren't paying attention,
concepts were obstacles to enlightenment, and so recognizing one's
fundamental mind could only be done by banishing conceptual thinking.
People like that are hopeless imbeciles. But I don't mind. Do you?

>  My recent reading of De la Vallée Poussin's Nirvana
> has been a bit of an eyeopener. ... As a start he considers Buddhism
> to be a branch of Yoga.

Hardly anyone would agree with that assessment any more. It's far too
anachronistic. The Yoga system as we now know it did not emerge until at
least 500 years after the Buddha had kicked the bucket. There are
similarities to be sure, and I personally think that combining Buddhist
meditative exercises with yoga is an excellent practice for pot-bellied
old quasi-Quaker Cynics like me. Still, I think the dying vestiges of
concern for some degree of historical accuracy would urge me to insist
that Buddhism influenced Yoga much more than the other way around. 

> When we now present Buddhism as a religion, 
> it all looks so neat and clean

Really? I must say that Buddhism has never seemed particularly tidy to
me. But I would say its failure to be neat and clean stems precisely
from its being presented as a religion, and especially a religion that
tried to have a little something for everyone. Religions are messy
things, and I fear the world will never be at peace until we have
banished them from the face of the earth. If one presents Buddhism as a
religion, I would argue, then one is surely not presenting Buddhism at
all. Buddhism, as I see it, is an antidote to dogmatism and narrowness
of mind, while religion is a systematic closing of the mind and
hardening of the heart. I like to see the Buddha as a guy who was just
barely getting by. As soon as he is depicted as having a perfectly
enlightened mind that is no longer prone to error, the Buddha becomes a
comic book hero, sort of like Batman or Donald Duck. Who needs that?

> an experience that is normally concealed by conceptualization

Conceptualization itself comes from the mind. Conceptualizing is the
nature of the mind. SO how can it obscure the nature of the mind?

> and an experience that cannot be expressed conceptually.

There is nothing at all that cannot be expressed. There is also nothing
at all that can be expressed precisely and in such a way that it will
enable something who has not experienced what is being talked about to
have as vivid a picture as he or she would have if she had experienced
it. Language is effective only among those who already know intimately
what is being talked about.

> That is, at its heart Buddhism is a mystical tradition. And if this is
> lost sight of, one loses sight of what Buddhism is really about.

Somehow I thought Buddhism was about being freed from the pain that is a
natural consequent of greed, hatred and delusion. I think there is a
danger of losing sight of that aim if one insists too much on seeing
Buddhism as essentially mystical.

> But if anyone was offended or made angry by my posts, I am
> sorry.

I can't imagine that anyone would be angered by anything you have said.
If they are, it's their own damn fault. They should be ashamed if they
blame you for saying something that makes them angry.

> Rinpoche spoke in Tibetan and used the Tibetan words for mind. The translator
> used the word "spiritual" for the benefit of the (New Age) American audience.

That makes sense. I would expect that the Tibetan teacher spoke rather
precisely about these matters. It is notoriously difficult to come up
with adequate terminology that captures in English (or French, German,
Spanish or Italian) just what Sanskrit and Tibetan terms have come to
mean during centuries of use. Indeed, my thesis supervisor told me many
times that it was impossible for him to translate Sanskrit accurately
into his native Bengali. (This makes sense. Who can translate Latin
accurately into Spanish of French?) 

Given the enormous conceptual incongruities between classical, medieval
and modern languages, translators have an almost-impossible task. In
talking about medieval Buddhism, what they are often forced to do is to
use ready-made terms from Catholicism, Protestantism, Freudian and
Jungian psychology and modern and post-modern philosophy, not to mention
popular culture. The result is often, but probably not always,
misunderstanding. Some, but not all, of these misunderstandings may be
serious enough to undermine one's practice in some way or another for a
while. But I doubt if it really matters very much in the long run, for
in the long run we all end up pretty much dead, no matter whether we
have done practice "right" or "wrong".

> *All* language is upaaya, anyway.

No, it's not. An upaaya is a minor road that leads to a major road. Not
all language does that. Some language actually leads one away from where
one is hoping to go. It is counterproductive and misleading, so it fails
to be upaaya. I still think "spirit" talk is in that category. Perhaps
all language fails as a sufficient condition for achieving the peace of
selflessness, but some language fails much more than others. I would
still claim that speaking of "spirituality" does far more to mislead
than to guide.

> I like Wittgenstein's definition of the mystical: "The mystical is 
> that which reveals itself."

Where exactly does he say that? Usually people define truth as that
which reveals itself, on the basis of the Greek word for truth meaning
something like "coming out of concealment". The term "mystic" originally
meant someone who was initiated into a secret society, that is, into a
mystery cult of some sort. Then the term "mystical" came to refer to
knowledge that is not obvious, and especially to knowledge that does not
come either from the senses or from reasoning. So usually the mystical
is precisely the opposite of that which reveals itself. Perhaps that is
why the notoriously cantankerous Wittgenstein decided to define it as
just the opposite of what it normally means. 

Because so many Buddhists in India spent so much time and energy arguing
that all of our knowledge comes only from sensory experience and reason,
I am inclined to regard Buddhism as anti-mystical. But I think this
anti-mystical attitude of Indian scholastic Buddhism may have given way
to other attitudes in East Asia. Those East Asians often had a very
different take on the meaning of the Buddha's teachings than the
Indians. Some Chinese scholastic said this was because Indians and
Chinese people had such different temperaments and talents. Xie Lingyun,
for example, reportedly argued that the Indians are very good at picky
details but deficient in insight, while the Chinese are very good at
gaining insight into universals but rather poor at mastering details.
And that is why the Buddha taught gradualism to Indians--to accommodate
their penchant for wallowing in countless details; if he had taught
Chinese, he would have followed the model of Confucius and Laozi and
taught subitism. 

If Xie Lingyun is right, it raises the very interesting question of how
the Buddha would have taught Americans, who are neither insightful nor
good at mastering details. Perhaps he would have taught something like
Bikram yoga. "Here. Go into a room heated up to a temperature of 40C and
do lots of strenuous exercises and if you don't die of a stroke or heart
attack, come back the next day and pay another $20 to do the same
thing."

> There is something similar near the end of the Tractatus as well:
> 6.522   Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches. Dies zeigt sich, es ist
> das Mystische.

That is quite a bit different from what Ron Leifer reported. Leifer's
version suggests that anything that manifests itself is ipso facto
mystical, while the Tractatus statement seems to say simply that some
things reveal themselves that cannot be expressed, and we call these
things mystical. The Tractatus version makes a lot of sense; indeed, I
can't easily imagine anyone denying it. As for Leifer's version, I can't
easily imagine anyone accepting it.

> In my 30 some-odd years of studying ways to alleviate dukkha, by far
> the most difficult source for me was anger. Anger has been my primary
> koan.

Anger has followed me around like a gorilla on my shoulders. For years I
struggled with it. Finally I stopped and thought about it really hard,
and I realized that just about everything that annoys me is somebody
else's fault. I'm angry because the world is filled with incompetent
jerks. It's that simple. What a burden that realization lifted off my
weary shoulders. I have been a saccharine cupcake ever since. 

> Despite Buddhism's outranking many Protestant denominations in
> population here, Americans demand Christian belief from their
> presidents.

How things have changed, eh? Hardly any of the first presidents were
Christians. Of the first six, I don't think a single one was a
Christian. They were mostly Deists and Unitarians and things like that.
I don't think religion was ever much of an issue until the
anti-Communist fevers of the 20th century, at which time being
anti-Stalinist required that one be pro-Jesus (and I don't mean Kris
Kristoffersen's Jesus who "was a Capricorn and ate organic food.") 

It may be some time before we have a Buddhist president, but we have
already had a Buddhist Secretary of the Interior. Seward, who made his
name by buying Alaska from the Russians for a handful of ice cubes,
considered himself a Buddhist. Mind you, he did not broadcast that
information until a few days after he had died and needed to make
funeral arrangements for himself, but he considered himself a Buddhist
all the same. I suspect that the same is true of Dennis Kucinich. He is
so obviously a Buddhist that it makes me laugh when he claims (obviously
for public consumption) to be a Catholic. Catholic? Yeah right, Dennis! 

> As American presidents grow more imperial, perhaps the need for this
> humbling will increase.

The American Empire is showing all the signs of crumbling before our
very eyes. There will not be any more Imperial Presidents, I predict.
The humbling of America has already begun; only the current occupant of
the White House has failed to catch on that he is a naked emperor
presiding over the ashes of a one-time great power. 

> No doubt Ashoka was full of himself, too.

No doubt about it. And we can thank him for destroying Buddhism in the
process, in much the same way that America's line of Imperial Presidents
have destroyed the things they claim to worship, such as Freedom. 

>  And I am growing a little tired of being called
> "spiritual" too. What the hell is that supposed to mean?

I think it means someone whose approach to life is to solve problems by
going for refuge to the Three J's: Jim Beam, Jack Daniels and Johnny
Walker. Given the fifth precept, I think Buddhists are supposed to avoid
spirituality. 

> I have seen it claimed that the Buddha said something to the following
> effect:
> "I too use concepts but I am not fooled thereby." I have never found this in
> any sutta. Does anyone have a sutta reference for this

You may be thinking of what the Buddha reportedly said at the end of the
Po.t.thapaada Sutta (Diigha-nikaaya 9). There is a passage in paragraph
53 in which the Buddha is explaining various kinds of self to a confused
fellow named Citta, after which he says "But, Citta, these are merely
names, expressions, turns of speech, designations in common use in the
world, which the Tathaagata uses without misapprehending them."
(Walshe's translation) 

In case you're interested in the Pali, it goes like this: 

Itimaa kho Citta lokasama~n~naa loka-niruttiyo loka-vohaara
loka-pa~n~natiyo yaahi Tathaagato voharati aparaamasan ti. 

This passage seems to me one of the likely sources of the refrain so
often found in the Diamond(-cutter) Sutra: "X not-X tathaagatena
bhaa.sitam, tena ucyate X." (The Tathaagata explains that X is [in fact]
not X. He [just] calls it X.) This formula seems to suggest that the
Tathaagata knows that things are not in fact as one talks about them,
but he talks about them anyway, without being confused by his language. 

Incidentally, Conze butchers that passage in his translation. He usually
renders it something like "The Tathagata declares that X is not X,
therefore it's called X." That translation never made any sense at all
to me. It stems, I think, from Conze's taking "tena" is the sense of
"therefore" instead of seeing that it is a pronoun referring back to
"tathaagatena." So "tena" names the agent of "ucyate," thus showing that
the Tathaagata both explains that X is not-X and calls it X anyway. So
the Tathaagata used language without confusion, but Conze did not.
(Despite his horrible confusion about most things of any importance,
Conze deserves our respect for motivating an entire generation of
scholars to go forth and correectly understand all the things that he
himself failed to grasp.)

> Thanks very much for this. On ATI, the translation of the Pali gives
> "without grasping to them" instead of "without misapprehending them." 
> Could you please tell me which is the truer translation?

Paraamasa seems to be some sort of addiction or grasping. It's
best-known occurrence is in the phrase siilabbataparaamasa, which is
often translated as clinging to good conduct and vows (and often
mistranslated as clinging to rites and rituals). In discussing that
term, Buddhaghosa describes it as placing a high value on something that
stems from a failure to see its true value, which is lower than the
value one has placed on it. So in the context of this discussion of
language, I guess what is being said is that the Tathaagata uses
language in practical ways (voharati) without placing undue importance
on it. 

In his discussion of koan practice, Victor Hori talks about a stage of
that practice in which the main emphasis is on learning to use language
without being trapped by the linguistic structures one uses. I suppose
one could say, I I understand this correctly, that this stage of koan
practice would be dedicated to mastering the art of thinking and
speaking heuristically rather than absolutely. If so, that particular
phrase of koan practice would be one of the many ways of achieving a
desideratum that was articulated from the very beginning by the Buddha. 

> I've always loved Conze's writing.

I don't know anything about Eisel Mazard, but I do see in both Conze and
Warder a readiness--I would even say an eagerness--to characterize
others as fools whom one is not obliged to suffer gladly. There is a
decided meanness of spirit and failure of intellectual charity at work
in both these people that betokens to me a need to spend more time on
the earlier stages of the bodhisattva path before plunging into wisdom.

> But what did Conze get so egregiously wrong, generally speaking?

He falsely assumed that the Buddha, followed by the tiny percentage of
disciples who truly grasped the importance of the Buddha's teaching, was
hostile to the laws of logic. Conze even says in a few places that he
thinks the laws of logic are nothing more than obsessive quirks in
Aristotle's thinking that Aristotle somehow managed to foist off onto
almost all of Western civilization, except for a few gnostics. Seeing
Buddhism in this way also leads to seeing the Buddha as trading in
transcendent realities, where "transcendent" is seen as being outside
the reach of rationality. Conze insists on this picture of Buddhism in a
number of places, and it is this picture that I find horribly
wrong-headed. Look, the guy was an unrepentant mystic. Mystics are
constitutionally incapable of grasping the first thing about Buddhism.

>    The  problem  as I understand it is as follow. The dichotomy is not
> between  thinking  and  meditation, but between effective thinking and
> ineffective thinking; moreover, I feel that when we forget thinking in
> favor  of  meditation  in  name  of  a "practical orientation", we are
> sowing  very  dangerous  seeds.

I could not agree with you more, but that only betrays my preference for
some forms of Indian Buddhism and for what some people eventually called
gradual cultivation (krama-bhaavanaa). In this way of looking at
practice, the word "mind" refers not to any one thing but to a
collection of characteristics. Some of these characteristics are
competent in that they lead to desirable results, while others are
incompetent in that they lead to results other than the ones one hoped
for. The whole point of training is to replace the incompetent habits
with competent ones. These habits are not only habits of thought but
also habits of what we might call feeling or emoting. 

For example, I get annoyed whenever the telephone rings or whenever my
wife lovingly asks me whether I'd like a cup of tea, because I am
self-absorbed and hate being interrupted by anyone for any reason. That
is a character flaw that causes me and everyone else who has to live
with me a certain amount of vexation. I would not say it is rooted in
thinking exactly. And I certainly cannot think my way out of it. But
thirty-five years of meditation practice have also been unable to root
out this particular design flaw. So I conclude this particular feature
was put into me by God, who must be evil. But I digress. 

There is an entirely different way of looking at the mind in Buddhism
than the gradualist one I have just described. This other way is to see
one's original and fundamental nature as being inherently pure. This
innate purity is obscured by various kinds of mental commotion, one of
them being thinking. So in this view the attempt to purify one's thought
by thinking more clearly is still generating the sort of commotion that
obscures one's original nature. So people who hold this view tend to go
around saying "Thinking bad. Meditating good." And since they hold
tenaciously to this false dichotomy, they call themselves "non-dualists"
(in about the same way that George W. Bush says "I am a uniter, not a
divider" as he divides the country more than it has been divided since
the Civil War.) Beware of these "non-dualist" Buddhist idiots, for they
are likely to vote Republican. But again I digress. 

This second view, the view that one has a mind of original purity, is,
needless to say, quite ridiculous, but some people do hold it, and they
should be tolerated, just as a silly child should be tolerated.
Eventually these people will grow up, but it will be a process of very
gradual cultivation, aided in no small measure by exposure to wise,
critics such as yourself and such folks as Hakamaya and Matsumoto (whose
works are translated in Hubbard and Swanson's book "Pruning the
Bodhi Tree". 

> Many American Christians I've talked to assume that "Buddha" is a name
> for "God."

That's okay. Let them believe that. It doesn't hurt them, and it doesn't
hurt Buddhists. Perhaps they should be told, just for the sake of
completeness, that in Indonesia it is "nirvana" that is the equivalent
of "God". Indonesian Buddhists have learned that allowing the government
to think that nirvana is for Buddhists the same as God for everyone else
keeps religious persecution at bay and allows Buddhism to be regarded as
one of the five legitimate religions. 

I think if Buddhists were to make too much of a fuss about insisting on
their atheism in a country as generally ignorant about comparative
religion as the USA, it would serve no useful purpose whatsoever except
to alienate people against them. 

To my way of thinking it is completely harmless to imagine a Buddhist as
someone who might in some way believe in God. What I see as much more
potentially harmful is imagining a Buddhist as someone who might vote
for, or in any other was support, a neo-conservative Republican. 

> It seems that the term for mind in Bangla or Hindi (mon, man), and also
> presumably in Pali (?), is often translated as "heart" sometimes and
> as "mind" other times, and vice-versa.

A fairly common way of looking at manas (usually translated "mind") in
Buddhist texts is that it is an internal sense faculty that perceives
intellectual processes and emotional states. So when one is watching
what Europeans called emotions, one is watching dharmas with the manas.
But every faculty (indriya) has a physical locus. The eye is the
physical locus of the faculty of vision. The heart (h.rdaya) is the
physical locus of the faculty that perceives dharmas. This same h.rdaya
is also a blood pump. So say the principal scholastic texts written a
couple of thousand years ago in India.

> The heart as a signifier of emotion also has its history in European
> languages and literatures. (There must be a few dissertations on this
> somewhere.)

Lynken Ghose wrote about this to some extent in his thesis "Emotion in
Buddhism: A case study of Asvaghosa's Saundarananda." (McGill
University, 1999) He strives to untangle the very complex history of how
such terms as "emotion" have been used in various stages of European
philosophy and asks to what extent various Sanskrit terms can serve as
equivalents of various Western terms in both philosophical psychology
and modern psychotherapy. Aldo very useful is Robert C. Solomon's book
called "The Passion". Solomon also had a hand, along with
Roger T. Ames, in putting together a useful tome called "Emotions
in Asian thought : a dialogue in comparative philosophy".

> To me, buddhism is a mind training practice that also involves the
> sentiments, feelings or emotions as part of the training, e.g., when
> presenting the brahma viharas, or in metta practice.  However, I've noticed
> that meditation teachers love to use the term "heart" as a euphemism for
> emotions.

That follows the conventions of those people in the European tradition
who distinguish head from heart. I don't think that distinction was ever
made in classical India. Thoughts and reactions to them are all part of
the dharma-dhaatu, that is, the mess of internal phenomena that are
sensed through the manas located in the h.rdaya. In classical India, the
head wasn't involved at all. The brain was seen as nothing but a pile of
snot that dribbled out the nostrils when one had a cold. But in the
west, a distinction was made between intellect and emotion, located
respectively in the head and the heart. So if one wishes to focus on
cultivating positive emotions, one speaks of the working with the heart.

> Frankly, I have observed that this "heart" usage seems to
> confuse some people participating in a retreat.

Have you observed that it confuses mostly excessively literal people who
do not fully appreciate that language is very fluid and that no
terminology is absolute or fixed, and that this fluidity becomes
especially evident when one crosses nebulous cultural boundaries?
Perhaps such people cannot be helped very much. Quietly suggest that
they go join a fundamentalist church that teaches that Elijah literally
rose up in a chariot of fire and in which the congregation feverishly
supports the Republican party.

> Another monk has told me that not
> everything that happens to one is a result of past karma - some events are
> merely chance occurrences.  Does anyone know of any Sutras that support one or
> the other of these contentions?

I am not sure of sutras, but Theravada scholasticism does talk about
kamma as being only one of five kinds of casual relationship. The others
are such causal forces as physical forces (hurricanes, earthquakes etc)
and biological forces (diseases and so forth). There are two other
no-kamma kind of causality. In looking for the causes behind evens, one
is supposed to try to explain events by referring to the non-kamma
forces first. Only if one cannot give a satisfactory account by
appealing to them should one turn to karma as a last explanatory resort.

Most Buddhist scholastics would deny that anything happens purely by
chance, since the Buddha himself denies that. But there are plenty of
things that happen by causal relationships that have nothing whatsoever
to do with karma/kamma.

> From what I gather, the problem is that the Buddhist theory of cause and
> effect is a "many-to-many" one.

Yes, exactly. And because of that, it is difficult if not impossible to
sort out causality of any kind. At best, we can arrive at statistical
correlations between events and their antecedent events.

> The causes and conditions may very well be classified as one of the five
> niyamas but because of the complexity and the arbitrariness in labeling
> what as primary cause and what as supporting conditions, karma surely
> enters the picture.

That is one way of stating the issue. Another way would be to say that
karma is itself a heuristic category to which there may or may not
correspond anything in reality. Perhaps it is not a bad idea to see
karma as a mythological category that we human being use when we wish to
focus on a moral dimension to casual relationships. Like all myths, when
one tries to give it a precise shape, or when one tries to mix it with
science, the results range from comical to intellectually disastrous. 

> In any case, I have been reminded that only enlightened beings are capable
> of fully discerning karma (and cause and effect) - all the rest of us are
> purely speculating.

Quite so. Indeed, I would say that the rest of us are speculating even
when we say that enlightened beings are capable of discerning karma. We
may in fact be giving them too much credit. My own inclination would be
to say that nobody ever fully understands karma. Indeed, it could very
well be that there is really no such thing as karma for anyone to
discern; it could well be that what enlightened beings discern is that
karma doesn't exist at all but is merely one of the many delusions of
sentient beings. But that is only speculation, of course.

> The most common definition of karma found in Pali suttas is that kamma/karma
> is cetannaa ('intention', 'will').  This seems to restrict karma to
> individuals.

Just to play Mara's advocate for a moment, one does hear of such
expressions as "the will of the people." The way I have heard group
karma discussed (by Lati Rinpoche long years ago) is that when a group
of people make a collective decision to take on a cooperative venture,
such as going to war or sending a robot to Mars, then all the
individuals participate to some extent in the consequences of that
decision. It could even be argued that if the people of a country were
to elect an incompetent dimwit from some place like Texas, then all the
citizens of that country would share to some extent in the consequences
for whatever harm said dimwit inflicted on the rest of the world through
his or her greed, hatred and delusion. 

A very very long time ago I heard the Cuban ambassador to Canada respond
to a questioner who asked when there would be elections in Cuba. He said
"Almost every household in Cuba has a gun. Castro walks freely in the
streets of Cuba. Every day nobody shoots him, he is elected." 

If one follows this Cuban sort of logic, then one could say that even if
one did not vote for a dimwit, if one does not somehow prevent him from
acting on his greed, hatred and delusion, then one is participating in
it by an act of cetanaa. Could one not see that as something very much
like what Theosophists mean by group karma?

> Would anyone, off the top of their heads, point me in the direction of
> cites in the Buddhist cannon relative to sacrifice. I seem to recall the
> Buddha being critical of Vedic ritual but, not being the most organized of
> thinkers, I am not the most organized for the recall of these cites.

Take a look at the Kutadanta Sutta, which is sutta 5 in the Digha-nikaya
(the long-winded discourses). There the Buddha says talks about animal
sacrifice as something that does not get the results for humans it is
claimed to get, and meanwhile it terrifies animals and ultimately wastes
them. So the Buddha proposes things to do in lieu of animal sacrifice,
such as living an ethical and thoughtful life. It's one of my favorite
suttas, because it makes such good sense and is wickedly satirical. 

There is also quite a bit of criticism of, and some delightful satire
about, sacrifice in various parts of the Sutta-nipata. There it is said
that sacrifice was invented by incompetent and lazy Brahmins, who are
described as charlatans who invented sacrifice as a quick way to make
money and impress the girls. As far as I can tell, this is the most
accurate description of the origins of religion in the entire history of
religious studies. 

> I do not see how it can be reconciled with MMK statements like
> XV. 6

That verse says
begin{quote}
 svabhaava.m parabhaava.m ca bhaava.m caabhaava.m eva ca
 ye pa"yanti na pa"yanti te tattvam buddha"saasane
end{quote}

Translation: They who see one's own nature and the nature of others only
as presence and absence do not see the truth in the Buddha's program. 

On other words, those who absolutize and see natures ONLY (eva) in one
way completely fail to get the point of the Buddha's entire program.
(Please recall that "saasana means not only the teachings but the
institutions and the way of life set out by the Buddha in the sutras and
in the vinaya. It includes all the meditative exercises, all the
precepts and all the regulae of the life properly lived. All that is for
one purpose: to enable one to stop holding on obsessively to any
teaching as an absolute and irrefutable truth.)

> XV.7

This refers to the Kaatyaayanaavavaada, the only text that Nagarjuna
ever alludes to. It is a pre-Mahayana sutra in which the Buddha says to
Katyayana that there are two extremes. One extreme is the view that
everything exists (sarvam asti), and the second is the view that nothing
exists (sarvam naasti). 

The view that everything exists, says the Buddha, can be refuted by
simply observing that experiences come to an end. Nothing lasts forever.
Nothing has eternal existence. 

The view that nothing exists at all, says the Buddha, can be refuted by
observing that experiences arise. If there were nothing at all, there
would be, well, nothing at all, not even delusions and fantasies and
misconceptions.

> Not to be saying svabhava does not exist, but rather that our concept of
> existence is itself fundamentally flawed such that we cannot coherently
> describe objects of experience in terms of either existence or
> non-existence.

There is nothing at all flawed in our concept of existence. It is not
the idea that gets us into trouble. It is attachment to things and to
ideas about things that gets us into trouble. It is the inability to see
that the Buddha was a very light teacher, rather than just another
purveyor of heavy and ponderous absolutes, that creates almost all the
suffering that Buddhists experience. 

> The blissful muting of bad thinking is the muting of all apprehensions.
> The Buddha pointed out no dharma to anyone anywhere.

What this verse claims is that faulty thinking (prapa~nca), which is the
root cause of all trouble (du.hkha), has its origination in apprehension
or understanding (upalambha, upalabdhi). Therefore the way to mute the
effect is to mute the cause. The root cause is our understanding,
correct or incorrect, for it is on the basis of that understanding that
we denigrate those who disagree with us and get puffed up about our own
prowess. And that state of denigrating others and aggrandizing ourselves
is one of the final, and most difficult-to-ereadicate, obstacles to
nirvana.

It is only by taking dharmas lightly--that is, provisionally and
heuristically-- that we can avoid taking them in the wrong way. So it
this sense, the Buddha never taught any dharma to anyone in an absolute
way. He never taught the absolute truth. He only taught provisional,
conventional, heuristic, contextualized truths. Taking his teachings in
the wrong spirit can only cause turmoil to oneself and others.

> This is an interesting counter-reading. I understand you to say that these
> lines are literally saying that an incorrect dharma has never taught by any
> Buddha to anyone ever.

I would say just the opposite. No absolutely correct dharma has been
taught anywhere to anyone.

An easy way to see this is to note that the distinction between ultimate
truth and conventional truth is itself (and can only be) a conventional
truth. In other words, making this distinction is itself only an upaaya,
a heuristic device that enables one to see things more clearly.
Eventually one realizes that this distinction cannot be maintained.
There are not two truths at all. There is only one level of truth, and
it cannot be made absolute. The problem with language is that it always
sounds absolute. That's what makes teaching so dangerous. And the danger
becomes especially acute when one thinks that a Buddha taught absolute
truths.

> I would argue in a slightly different way that Nagarjuna refutes logic
> INSOFAR AS IT ALWAYS implies an ontology.

No it doesn't. Besides, ontology is not the problem at all. It is a side
issue, a red herring. The issue is clinging to one's views, whatever
one's views may be. The issue throughout the MMK is prapa~nca, the
obsessive clinging to one's understandings.

> As far as I can tell, the doctrine of the two truths occupies a mere three stanzas
> of the MMK (XXIV. 8-10).

Well, yes. But one of those stanzas does say that a failure to
understand the two truths renders one incapable of attaining the end to
the delusions that cause trouble (du.hkha). That seems an important
claim, even if it is said only once. (Americans have a tendency to
believe that a thing is important and true only if it is said over and
over again. But Nagarjuna was not that dull-witted.)

> I don't know but I do strongly wonder if Nagarjuna was cutting deeper. I
> simply don't understand how we can say "conventionally exists" when
> Nagarjuna clearly says ( in my reading) "forget all this
> existence/non-existence crap".

I see no evidence at all that Nagarjuna was making that sort of radical
claim. I see plenty of evidence that he was warning against prapa~nca,
which for him seems to have been a particularly strong attachment to
seeing things only from one perspective and therefore being incapable of
seeing things from other perspectives. As I read Nagarjuna, he was
warning us against George W. Bush and various other fundamentalists who
think they possess the whole truth and that people who disagree with
them are dangerous terrorists who need to be killed. 

> "The illustrious one said 'The perfected one has his being as a reflection
> of the pure, passionless truth; he is not ultimately real in himself nor is
> he perfected; he is behld as a reflection in all worlds.'"

This just sounds like gibberish to me. I hate it when Candrakiirti
starts talking this way. I suspect he may have been smoking hashish.

> Further, he says of poor deluded persons such as yourself:
> "Those who strain for nirvana as the everlasting extinction of all elements
> of existence, these I say are self-deluded heretics."

Deluded I certainly am, but not in quite that way. You see, I have never
strained for nirvana as the everlasting extinction of all elements of
existence. That is precisely the sort of absolutizing that offends my
sensibilities. I don't believe in nirvana at all, except perhaps as a
state of accepting samsara as it is and not trying to change it in any
way at all. But that condition, I maintain, is quite transitory. In my
case it vanishes the moment I see George W. Bush. Then I lose all
equanimous ability to accept samsara as it is and begin hankering for
the everlasting extinction of all elements of the Bush administration.

> This is the dangerous heresy, apparently, that comes of understanding the
> great Madhyamaka teachings as refuting existence alone, without further
> understanding that non-existence is refuted as well.

Look, there is not word for "heresy" in Sanskrit. That's a Jewish idea,
later borrowed by Christians. No need for us Buddhists to continue
borrowing a bankrupt idea that does no good at all but to set Us Good
Guys against Them Bad Guys. But that aside, I don't think the danger
lies in understanding Madhamaka as refuting existence. I don't think
Madhyamaka refutes existence as such. It just refutes the notion of any
existent being unconditioned, permanent and absolute. The danger (if one
wishes to call it that) lies in taking nirvana to be unconditioned,
permanent and absolute. 

> Consider MMK XX5.24:
> mya ngan las 'das pa brtag pa zhes bya ba ste rab tu byed pa nyi shu lnga pa'o
> Totally pacifying all referents and totally pacifying fixations is peace.
> The Buddha nowhere taught any dharma to anyone.

Perfectly straightforward, I think.

> So in your reading, if I understand it correctly, Nagarjuna meant:
> Totally pacifying all referents and totally pacifying fixations is peace.
> The Buddha [who ultimately] nowhere [conventioanlly] taught any [ultimate]
> dharma to anyone.

You do not understand me correctly at all. In my reading Nagarjuna meant
that there is much peace to be gained by becoming liberated from the
obsession with dharmas conceived as static quanta or reality that can be
measured, quantified, enumerated, named and classified.

> Why did he not simply state "enduring self does not exist"? It
> seems clear to me that his meaning is deeper-reaching.

What could possibly be deeper than to show that there is no enduring self?

> I see the MMK as a strong attack on logic insofar as it is taken to refer to
> existing objects.

If that is how you see the MMK, you do not in fact see the MMK at all.
You see a neo-Romantic anti-intellectual post-modern quasi-feminist
fantasy that your heavily conditioned mind has superimposed upon a
rather simple and straightforward text written long ago in an entirely
different culture whose ways you have not studied with sufficient care.
Perhaps you have spent altogether too much time in an American graduate
school. May I suggest talking a long walk and watching a river flow?
As you watch the river flow, ask whether a current is a dharma. That
will make the MMK very clear to you.

> In the case of Nagarjuna's tetralemma, the appearant logical contradiction
> is resolved by positing "ultimate existence" as an empty set.  This cuts
> through the Gordian Not (if you'll excuse the pun) of the tetralemma in an
> apparently logical and coherent way.

I don't think anyone in India ever thought the tetralemma posed a
logical problem. It was always understood that each of the lemmas was a
shorthand way of referring to a proposition that had qualifications that
would remove apparent absurdities. The logic, in other words, was
perfectly standard in India and not entirely unlike the Jaina
syaad-vaada method of fleshing out apparently contradictory propositions
with qualifiers that removed the contradiction. Thus apparent
contradictions such as "The jar is both present and absent" could be
made less jarring by fleshing out the propositions as follows: "The jar
is present in the pantry, but absent from the bedroom." Tsong kha pa, I
think, just made explicit to Tibetans what had already been well known
to Indians.

I don't quite get the connection to empty sets. I don't think one needs
any reference to such concepts as empty sets to make perfectly good
sense of Indian and Tibetan Madhyamika.

> This is all well and good and it seems to be a strong approach in many ways,
> but I'm left with my original question: how then can we account for the
> existence of phenomena at all?

Easy. Some phenomena, such as cars and elephants, are complexes made of
parts and can be named; they exist conventionally. Some phenomena, such
as simple, momentary, non-recurring, unique particulars can never be
named; they exist ultimately. Both kinds of phenomena are conditioned
and therefore empty.

> Is it not the case that "conventional existence" is a contradiction in
> terms?

Not according to any system of Madhyamaka I have studied. A thing is
considered real/existent/present (sat) if it appears as an item of
cognition. It is conventional if there is a name for it. There is a name
for it if it is a complex thing made up of simple parts. I am typing
this on a keyboard. A keyboard is an item in my awareness, so it is
real. It is conventional because it is a complex presence. The ultimate
realities underlying it are various patches of black and white shapes
that are sensed through vision and hardness that is sensed through
touch. 

>Buddhist concepts refer to subjective meditation experiences, so I am
>trying to see what these ideas would look like in terms of what I can see
>internally in my own mind.

Why? What is there to be gained by attaching someone else's labels to
what you see in your own mind?

>The nearest I can get to a visual emptiness is somewhat
>different from the nearest I can get to sound emptiness, for example.

Emptiness means nothing but conditioned nature. Everything you see is
conditioned, as is everything you hear and everything you think. Just be
content to know that you cannot get out of conditioned nature, no matter
what you do, and you will see that everything is empty. Asking whether
one emptiness differes from another is the work of an idle mind in
search of something to dull to do.

>Then, there is the step back to ground. What is it to actually remove the
>duality between perception of my emptiness-self and the lucidity of the
>perceptions?

It is too many words saying nothing of importance. It is obvious to me that
you read too much and think too much. What you need to ask yourself now is
why you do all that reading and thinking. Does it reduce your dukkha?
Somehow, I doubt it.

> all consciousness must have a common ground

Why? This seems to me like an unwarranted assumption, nothing more than
a proclamation of faith.

> and that means that we can get some understanding of another's
> subjective experience.

Understanding is not particularly important. It is sufficient to observe
one's own thoughts and feelings and to assess the extent to which they
are causing you distress, frustration and anxiety. If your thoughts are
characterized by distress, only you can figure out what to do about
that, and you can figure it out only by doing further introspective
observations. Reading about the experiences of others will only make you
confused. Worse, it will predispose you to making comparisons between
yourself and others, and such comparisons are nearly always a source of
pain and feelings of either inadequacy or arrogance (feelings of
inadequacy and arrogance are just opposite sides of the same coin).

> Therefore, the experience of others can alert us to things to look for
> in our own consciousness, which we might not of thought of to look for
> otherwise.

This has not been my experience. If it has been yours, perhaps you are
just lucky.

> JFN:::If you are correct that we can't get out of the ordinary world
> around us, then we are trapped eternally in a nightmare hell.

That has not been my experience at all. I have never gotten out of the
ordinary world for even a nanosecond, but for me life is for the most
part joyful and fascinating. It is as far from hell as I can imagine. 

>  Not being enlightened, I can't say for certain that the Buddhist way
> out of suffering is possible, but there is no reason to think it
> isn't.

Of course not. Who has said that the Buddhist way is not a way out of
suffering? Anyone who has had a friend knows that friendship is a way
out of much of the suffering that life has to offer. Anyone who has
enjoyed good relations with others as a result of being honest and
considerate and non-violent and generous knows the value of following
precepts. Anyone who has changed a dark mood into a lighter mood through
one of the hundreds of contemplative practices knows the value of
undertaking spiritual exercises of some kind. Anyone who has opened a
heart and mind knows that there are ways out of dukkha. All one needs to
do is to be observant of oneself and to make note of what works and what
does not work. The rest is a simple matter of heeding the lessons one
has learned through self-observation.

>  Here I am somewhat influenced by Kant, but going beyond his space
> analysis.

Kant can't help relieve your suffering. All he can do is give you verbal
diarrhea. That poor Prussian fellow was not content to be sick-minded
himself; he had to infect an entire civilization with his malady. Hardly
any European philosopher has written a coherent sentence since Kant
acted on his instinct that anything than can be said can be said
obscurely.

> I have not closely read Batchelor's writings on Buddhism without
> Karma, but it appears to me to be very much in line with [Korean
> (Batchelor was a Korean Zen monk)] Zen, if taken to its logical
> conclusions.

Just to set the record straight, Batchelor writes on Buddhism without
beliefs, not on Buddhism without karma. And by Buddhism without beliefs
he really means Buddhism without unsubstantiated beliefs, or, to put it
another way, Buddhism based on blind faith. He insists he is agnostic on
many classical Buddhist doctrines, by which he means quite simply that
he does not know and feels he cannot know. Something I find interesting
is that several of his critics (Bhikkhu Bodhi, Sangahrakshita, John
Pettit et al) turn his "I do not know about rebirth" into "I know that
there is no rebirth." They put into his mouth a much stronger position
than he actually states, then they attack the statement he was careful
not to make. Rarely have I seen such a lack of intellectual integrity
from otherwise intelligent men (and I do mean men---never I have I seen
a woman make a spurious attack on Batchelor).

> In this way, Batchelor is not really offering up something new: just
> articulating what is inherence in the Zen teachings.

Yes, I think this is exactly so. If one looks at his own trajectory, he
left the Gelug fold because of increasing discomfort with what he
perceived as the dogmatism of his teachers and fellow disciples, and he
looked around until he found something he felt at ease with, namely, the
Korean Son tradition, which he saw as depicting Buddhism as The Faith
to Doubt.

Batchelor has moved on to writing what to my mind is the most brilliant
summary of Nagarjuna's writings ever written (although I don't much like
his translation of Nagarjuna's verses). He sees Nagarjuna (rightly, I
think) as the brightest torchbearer in the parade of Buddhist agnostics.
I would add that the tradition of agnostics (or, as I prefer to call
them, skeptics) has a history that extends all the way from certain
suttas in the Pali canon, down through some of the Madhyamikas and some
of the so-called Buddhist logicians in India, into some forms of
Ch'an/Son/Thien/Zen.

> Lastly, Bhikkhu Bodhi in critiquing Batchelor's views on Buddhism
> without Beliefs, would be actually, but indirectly, the critiquing of
> the doctrinal views of (at least one lineage of) Zen.

So it would appear. Thanks for an excellent summary of Bhikkhu Bodhi's
sources and his philosophical adversaries.

> Re: priest v spiritual teacher. IMHO one important difference lies in the
> fact that authentic esoteric teachers aim to make themselves redundant.

I have always tried my best to make teachers, mentors and authority
figures redundant from the very beginning. That could account for how I
have managed to become a 58-year-old adolescent.

> We have to follow a discipline of regular sitting sessions.

I suppose if the goal is to become neurotic and obsessive, a regular
practice is de rigueur.

> We go into rereat now again.

Yes, it is good to get away from e-mail for a few days. But my
experience has been that e-mail is about the only thing I can
successfully get away from while on retreat. All the other demons that
torment me always go on retreat with me. They're sort of like cats. They
can tell you're going to try to leave them behind, so they learn to hide
in your suitcase as you're packing.

> I would honor any religion or philosophy that values compassion, the
> amelioration of poverty, the maintenance of the essentials of shelter,
> clothing, and nutrition, reformation rather than punishment of
> wrong-doers, basic medical care for all, and the end of violence as the
> ultimate solution to all political and economic differences.

I think it may be time to leave your home and native land and move to
Canada. But hurry. Even as we speak there are dark conservative forces
up there chomping at the bit to require poverty of a portion of the
population and the privatization of health care and the accelerated
exporting of all jobs and resources to countries that have no
environmental laws and that pay their workers $0.52 a day.

In any event, don't hold your breath waiting for any of these policies
to become part of the Church of America, where caring for people is
perceived as both ungodly and un-American.

> I am hoping that a Buddhist(s) especialy those who are interested in
> comparative religions studies between Buddhism and Islam, would come
> forward to clarify the misunderstanding/misrepresentations found in
> that book.

I have tried doing a bit of this sort of thing in the past. The results
are not promising. First, people who misrepresent Buddhism are, as a
rule, not terribly interested in getting facts straight. They are
generally no more interested in getting Buddhism right than Buddhists
were in getting various forms of Brahmanism, Jainism, or the doctrines
of the Aajiivikas and materialists right. Polemicists are polemicists,
not historians of religion. Secondly, I usually find that when I try to
say anything about Buddhism other Buddhists are very quick to tell me I
have mangled Buddhism at least as badly as the anti-Buddhists
polemicists did in the first place.

So I think the best thing to do on the whole is to do exactly what the
Buddha advised: just let people malign and misrepresent the
Buddha-dharma all they wish and to focus one's energy on trying to
follow the Buddha-dharma to the best of one's ability.

> When dealing with a Chinese translation of a Sanskrit (or other
> Indo-European) text, then grammatical concerns become important to the
> extent the Chinese retains indications of the original grammar. Some
> translators, such as Xuanzang, were better at that than others.

This semester I am reading a chapter of the Sanskrit text of the
Abhidharmakosha with a group of graduate students in philosophy. I have
been struck at how much more information is in Xuanzang's Chinese
translation than is in the original Sanskrit. Some of this extra
material seems to come from Ya"somitra, but I am not at all sure where
the other extraneous material comes from. 

What impresses me is that this extra material makes many passages
accessible that in the Sanskrit are quite obscure, so that Xuanzang
seems to have done an excellent job of translating not the words of many
passages but rather the artha. I sometimes wish more modern translators
of Asian texts into English follow Xuanzang's example by being more
liberal and less literal in their renderings. I'd rather have a
translation that is clearly wrong than opaquely right. (But then I have
never known what the difference between right and wrong is when it comes
to interpreting texts, so I guess all I am really saying is that I'd
rather have a lucid text than an opaque one.) 

>  Perhaps a better term for a Buddhist oriented concept of human
> interaction would be "social" or "cooperative."

The German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, whom I have never read,
reportedly distinguishes between "strategic" and "communicative" action.
Strategic action is designed to manipulate others in order to promote
one's own self-interests. Communicative action is designed to search for
truth. I like this distinction, since it has a parallel in Indian
Buddhist discourse theory. So I would prefer to preserve the word
"political" in its original sense and then perhaps distinguish between
strategic political actions and communicative political actions.
Buddhists (I should hope) would promote the latter kind, the sort of
political action aimed at determining which policies are most conducive
to reducing eliminable forms of dukkha from all living beings. 

> The Ring of Power cannot be wielded without corrupting the wearer.

Plato's ring (which got stolen by Tolkien) corrupts only because it
turns the wearer invisible. Visibility has a way of keeping people
honest. So I think the act of the bodhisattva these days is not to
retreat from the political process altogether but to keep exposing what
dishonest, incompetent and infantile politicians are doing until people
rise up and demand more honest, capable and mature ones.

>  Politics, War, Coercion and Plunder have been standard human games
> for all time.  Why did the Buddha decide not to pursue these courses
> of action?

You're begging the question. As far as I can see, the Buddha did not
decide against pursuing politics at all. Rather, he favored a form of
politics that was based on listening rather than telling, helping rather
than exploiting and providing rather than plundering. Take a look at
some of the political suttas in the Diigha-nikaaya.

>  an anarchist in the American revolutionary tradition.

Sorry to disillusion you, but a revolutionary is one of the most
political animals of them all.

> Otherwise, is it possible to live in the world and not be politically
> motivated on some level?

After living outside the USA for thirty-seven years, I often feel like a
brand-new immigrant here, trying to find my way around. For starters, I
am struggling to learn the language. One word that still baffles me is
the word "political," which in my idiolect means something like "of or
pertaining to policy, and especially the policies that arise as a result
of people living together." So for me it is almost impossible to imagine
anything that is NOT political in some sense, because there is nothing
that does not require that one think about it how one will live with
others. 

The impression I get from students and other native informants on the
American language, however, is that "political" has come to mean
something rather different from "of or pertaining to policy." It seems,
for some people at least, to mean "partisan" and "dogmatic" and
especially partisan and dogmatic in ways other than one's own
partisanship and dogmatism. So, for example, if I am in favor of a
measure that protects the environment, then a neo-conservative might
accuse me of just being "political," as if being political is somehow
nothing more than a matter of blind adherence to a dogma that I would,
if I really thought about it, readily dismiss. (Was it Irving Kristol
who defined a neo-conservative as a former liberal who got mugged by
reality, and a neo-liberal as a former liberal who got mugged by reality
and refused to press charges?) 

It is completely impossible for me to imagine being Buddhist without
being political in the sense I first spelled out. It is almost as
difficult for me to imagine being Buddhist and blindly dogmatic (if that
is what "political" in fact means in current Amerikanisch.)

> Modern translation is a different issue. A translation that follow the _current_
> English usage, where the masculine is _not_ inclusive, is likely to help female
> practitioners approach the Dharma without feeling excluded. I think this is a
> higher consideration than whether the resulting language looks ugly or beautiful
> to male academics.

Who would disagree with that? My only point is that it used to be the
case that the masculine did include the feminine and that we cannot use
current usage as a standard by which to judge writing published before
1967 (or whenever it was that somebody decided that the masculine no
longer included the feminine).

Of course one might ask why any woman would be interested in Dharma at
all, given that it is, as you rightly say, so very sexist. My own view
on the matter is that Buddhism was intended to be an all-male religion
from the very beginning and should remain that way. Women don't need it.

Men do. And I think women are much better off when the men in their
lives practice Dharma. Let women just continue being women, and they'll
be just fine.

> Before someone says "But the masculine _is_ inclusive": no, it isn't.

You're quite right. It isn't any more, because an entire generation has
been trained to see the masculine as exclusive.

> I vaguely recall that Pali and Sanskrit
> are free of the unfortunate sexism inherent in having to choose
> between he/him/his and she/her/hers. Is that really so?

Well, yes and no. It's true in the sense that a verbal ending can be
used without a pronoun. So gacchati can mean he goes or she goes
or it goes or one goes (or even, in polite usage, you go). 

> did the original translators intentionally introduce sexist
> language into the translated canon?

No. They did not introduce sexist language at all. They followed the
conventions that were universally true of Indo-European languages until
about thirty years ago. The language was not intrinsically sexist when
it was used. Rather, it was artificially MADE sexist by raising the
issue of sexism in the late sixties or early seventies. Once linguistic
gender was made into an issue, no one could ignore it, and prose has
been ugly ever since. But it would be wrong-headed in the extreme to
impost post-feminist linguistic sensibilities onto literature composed
in pre-femininist times.

> I thought George W. was from Connecticut.

He was. But only Texas would have him. (There are a lot of bodhisattvas
in Texas, so they'll tolerate anyone.) After about a month in Texas, GWB
thought he was born there. After buying his ranch in Crawford a year
before the 2000 elections, he even thought he had been born there on a
hard-scrabble ranch, instead of in Connecticut with a silver coke spoon
in his nostrils. 

By the way, did you know that if Texas were an independent nation, it
would have a higher percentage of its population in prison and on death
row than any other nation on earth?

>(That's my favourite, by the way, but then I'm pompous and English)

No need to apologize for being pompous. Being pompous is what BUDDHA-L
is all about. (Buddhism is merely a pretext, a focal point for our
pomposity.) 

> One of Freud's most seminal discoveries was that the lies we tell
> ourselves are the root of our neurosis.

Freud was a bit neurotic about lying. I rather like the observation of
C.S. Peirce to the effect that delusion probably has a significant
survival value. He was thinking especially of the sort of delusion
whereby we convince ourselves that we know and understand what in fact
we do not know and understand at all. If we acknowledged our radical
lack of knowing about most things, he says, we would be constantly
terrified and paralysed by indecision. The sort of delusion that takes
the form of believing that we know at least enables us to take actions.
Those actions, of course, will often lead to disaster. (Witness the
recent example of Tony and George knowing that Iraq was harboring
al-Qa'eda terrorists and weapons of mass destruction.) Still, taking the
risk of ending up in disaster may have a marginally greater survival
value than being paralysed by indecision, since risking disaster may end
up leading, however unpredictably and randomly, to success. 

> Or, as Buddha said: The root of suffering is ignorance.

I thought he said the root of suffering is craving. One form of craving,
of course, is the desire to know and understand. 

> 2. Belief which is not sound.  The believer believes it due to self
> deception.

Surely self-deception is only one of the many factors that might lead to
a false belief. Buddhists generally spoke in broader terms of delusion
(moha), which includes the whole spectrum of unwarranted beliefs. One of
the many things that might motivate one to believe something false, or
at least unwarranted, is simply that one wishes it to be true. And that
comes rather close to self-deception. Incidentally, the principal
Sanskrit word for "belief" is "icchaa", which literally means "desire".
The Indians saw such an intimate relationship between belief and desire
that several Sanskrit words mean both. 

Incidentally, while you ask "Can a person lie to himself," a Buddhist
woud be more inclined to ask "Can a person tell the truth to oneself."
The typical Buddhist response to that question would be: "Yes, it is
possible to be truthful with oneself. But it is very rare, and much more
difficult than most of us ever imagined."

> I wonder if it is so easy for my conceptual thinking to catch up to the
> precise nature of reality?

It almost goes without saying that conceptual thinking cannot capture
the precise nature of reality. Neither can any other kind of knowing,
such as sense perception or intuition. Fortunately, there is nothing in
life that requires knowing the precise nature of reality. If knowing the
precise nature of reality were necessary for survival, we would all be
dead.

> But I can certainly establish approximations that seem to generally
> hold true until events make it necessary to revise my descriptions.

Exactly (more or less). If one is willing to dispense with certainty,
universality and absolutes, life becomes much more manageable. And if
one can discard such concepts as truth and knowledge and proof, life
gets even better.

> For centuries it was quite appropriate for people to believe (or even
> know) that the earth was flat.

In Kansas and Saskatchewan it's still quite appropriate to believe this.
Nothing much of practical concern goes wrong if one operates on this
belief.

> I think Buddhism is big enough that there may be found a
> contrary position to every position taken

Well, no one really recommends dukkha, and no one advocates cultivating
carelessness and negligence as the best way to remove dukkha, and there
is even an enduring consensus on what kinds of things are careless in
nature and what kinds of things are not. These matters, I take it, are
of central importance to most Buddhists, and I do not find many people
taking up contrary positions to any of these matters.

> The problem with these two thinkers is that much of their writings
> about zen have much more to do with what _they_ want zen to be than
> anything else.

This brings two questions to mind: 
1) Is there anyone of whom this could not be said? 
2) Is that really a problem?

On the second question, I would argue that even if everyone can be
charged with selective understanding of everything he reads, this is not
a problem. I'm not sure Suzuki's Zen is any less valid than Dogen's or
Chinul's or Huineng's. Indeed, for people living nowadays it may be more
useful and authentic than the Zen of the irretrievable past.

> The spectre of Said hangs heavy over their writings like a frowning
> uncle.

I don't think so. Said's complaint was that European and American
scholars unwittingly portrayed the Middle East, and especially the Arab
world, in a way that made it seem ripe for being colonized by presumably
more capable people. Watts and Suzuki could hardly be charged with that
politically charged sort of distortion. One could hardly accuse either
of them of depicting Buddhists as a people who somehow needed to be
tamed or civilized through benign occupation and colonization. Theirs is
more the sort of distortion that any really intelligent and learned
scholar is bound to impose on anything he touches. I would argue that
theirs is a value-added distortion. If Europeans and American scholars
had distorted Arabic culture in the manner that Suzuki and Watts
distorted Zen, I think Said (may he rest in peace) would have purred
like a pussy cat.

> This will no doubt be exceptionally difficult, especially since zen eschews
> philosophy, there was no zen in Inda, and the history of zen, at least
> according to Bernard Faure, is more an exercise in religious politics than
> a trustworthy account of events.

Is the story of Gautama the Buddha any different?

According to Ch'an and Zen tradition, the founder of Ch'an Buddhism was
none other than the Buddha. So if the Buddha was in India, then there
was Ch'an in India. There is no doubt by Dumoulin's two-volume of Zen
begins with an account of Indian contemplative and scholastic
traditions.

As for eschewing philosophy, I suppose we might have to ask what
philosophy is. Some (Rorty et al) have argued that to speak of
philosophy anywhere outside Europe and its cultural satellites (which
now includes the Americas and the antipodes) is to impose an alien term
on other cultures. But I am more inclined to agree with Mohanty, who
argues that wherever people are discussing basic issues in metaphysics,
epistemology, ethics and aesthetics, they are doing something so similar
to what we call philosophy that we might as well just call it
philosophy. So if I may be permitted to use this broader definition of
philosophy, I would say that Buddhism in general has quite a lot of it,
and Ch'an/Zen in particular also has an abundance of it. This is not to
say, of course, that every Ch'an writer is a philosopher, but many of
the greatest of them no doubt were masterful philosophers.

The goals of Ch'an/Zen are not in the slightest different from the goals
of Buddhism as a whole. Nor are the methods really much different. So
while I would say that there may be a slightly different sociology in a
Japanese Zen monastery than in a Dharma Center in Chicago or
Albuquerque, and a difference in social relations between a Ch'an
monastery and Burmese monastery, these differences that might keep
sociologists engaged do not reflect significant differences in
philosophy or differences in attitude toward philosophy or difference in
attitude toward the value of thinking clearly.

In a long and well-written introduction, Hori discusses how koan
practice is actually done in Japan and shows that it is a method of
training the student to do serious thinking about philosophical issues
and careful research into Chinese literature, especially poetry. 

> The moderator has the policy of approving messages, so that a message may
> take a day to be posted.
> In some other lists, it takes minutes or less.

That is not enough time to say anything of value. What's the rush?
Better to take a few days to send in a carefully crafted response.

> I suggest this is changed, so as to make such dialogues possible in this
> list.

You don't want a moderated Buddhist listserv. You want a chat room, or a
news group, or a good companion. Sorry, but this BUDDHA-L can provide
neither real-time conversations nor companionship.

> There are many excellent web-based discussion forum
> presentation features these days.  One I know allows
> posters to rate each posting (a kind of Likert scale
> for relevance).

The discussion forum on the Christian Science Monitor web site has a
feature like this. I have noticed that people tend to use it as a
not-so-subtle form of censorship. What I have noticed in particular is
that all articles with a strong neoconservative bias get scored very
high, while those with a moderate or liberal bent get scored very low.
What I infer from this is that a few neoconservatives make sure they
rate every message, sort of like wolves peeing around the boundaries of
their territory. People who log in to the discussion groups have the
option of setting a filter that filters out all messages with a rating
lower than 3. Never have a seen a liberal or moderate message have an
average score above 2.5, and never have I seen a neoconservative message
with an average score much lower than 4.0 on a scale of 5. At first, I
rather liked the idea of rating messages (a bit like the rating system
of books and book reviews on Amazon), but I have come to dislike the
potential this seemingly harmless tool has for marginalizing certain
points of view. (I say this, of course, the average score of my messages
on the Christian Science Monitor Forum is around 1.07. I'd guess on
buddha-l it would be even lower than that, if we had a scoring system.)

> So it's possible that there IS a Santa Claus, along with his elves and
> Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Nixon, not to mention alcoholic
> red-nosed Rudi, because we can't prove with certainty that there isn't??

That's a matter of elementary modal logic, isn't it? If something is not
logically impossible, then it is logically possible. But arguing from
the possibility of something to its actuality is known as the fallacy of
argumentum ad ignorantiam. (Not surprisingly, this falllacy is exploited
frequently by religious polemicists and Republicans eager to start wars
in third world countries.)

> For  example,  if  I see a child suffering  from  starvation  and I
> want to change the sittuation, that seems  to  imply that I'm
> experiencing _dukkha_.

Yes, I should imagine that any time one wishes to do anything at all, no
matter how noble, then failure will result in some degree of dukkha. As
long as there are good causes, viva dukkha that results from failing to
carry them out. That having been said, I think the kind of dukkha that
Buddhist practice has the power to eliminate (in some people some of the
time) is the sort of dukkha that comes from intense personal involvement
and identification with the cause in question. While I might not be able
(or even desire to be able) to conquer the melancholy that naturally
arises when I see a world less good than I know it could be, I can hope
to conquer the bitter disappointment in myself that arise from my
wanting to see myself as a Knight on a White Horse who conquers all
dragons and rescues all damsels in distress. It's the dukkha that comes
of taking failure personally that Buddhism aims at finding a way to
eradicate.

>> Defilements (greed, etc) are
>> only formed after some years, hence a newborn child cannot have defilements
>> in its mind.
>
> where do you get the idea that defilements need years for their formation?

More to the point, where does he get the idea that kleshas are
defilements? The word "klesha" has no connection at all with nasty
stains, which is what "defilement" means. Klesha means affliction. I
reckon anyone who has ever heard a baby cry would acknowledge that it is
acting pretty much as one who is afflicted. So babies have kleshas from
the moement they are born, if not several months before. (When a foetus
moves to get more comfortable, it is responding to a klesha.)

> Nagarjuna seems to be saying (aside from the emptiness of mantras and
> medicine) that mantras are in the same league as medicine.

This is exactly what Dharmakirti says of them. And I take it that this
position is not different in principle from what the Buddha says about
mantras in the Brahmajalasutta and elsewhere. He says that neither he
nor his disciples drone mantras for a livelihood, nor do they heal
people for a livelihood. Buddhist monks were not encouraged to accept
payment (in currency or in kind) either for healing or for droning
mantras, but healing was certainly not discouraged. On the contrary, it
was encouraged, so long as it was not done for profit. So I think would
could argue, by parity of reasoning, that reciting mantras, which was
commonly seen as one of the many methods by which healing could be done,
was every bit as commendable as other forms of healing. As far as I
know, no one in India, even the materialists, denied the efficacy of
mantras for healing. 

> Is anything said about these mantra must be given by a guru for 
> them to work?

Dharmakirti was most probably not from a tradition that would place any
positive emphasis on gurus. His whole whole message is that if one can
learn to think clearly, then one can achieve what the Buddha achieved by
thinking clearly. His predecessor Dignaga regards a guru as something of
an obstacle, since one is inclined to accept their teachings
uncritically, and uncritical acceptance of anyone's teachings is an
obstacle to the kind of clarity of thought that sets one free from
delusions. 

So mantras for these fellows would probably be efficacious for the
reasons I stated earlier, namely, through the faith of the person who
uses them. If one believes in a mantra only if one is given it by a
guru, then a guru is part of the deal. If one can have faith in a mantra
without the guru, then the guru is dispensable. If one can have faith in
something other than mantras, then the other thing will be efficacious.
(If, for example, one can have faith in one's own powers of clear
thinking, then that will be sufficient to set one free.) If one can't
have faith in nothing nohow, not even in oneself, then I reckon the best
plan is to get used to dukkha.

> It seems to me that there is a limit to how much one's faith can
> accomplish.

Yes. Indeed, there is a limit to how much reality can accomplish toward
the end of satisfying all our various fantasies. I suppose that's why
the Buddha recommended becoming realistic as quickly as possible and
modifying one's desires to conform to what reality can provide. I'm not
sure just where mantras fit into the picture of becoming more 
realistic.
My prejudice, of course, is that mantras have a lot more to do with
fantasy than with reality and are therefore to be given up as soon as
one is able. So far this prejudice has not hurt me very much and seems
to have helped me quite a lot in being a pretty contented fellow, so I
make bold enough to recommend it to receptive ears.

> So what's YOUR idea of with what kind of power Shakyamuni attained
> Enlightenment? Muscle power?

Shakyamuni Buddha is a character who first makes his appearance in the
Lotus Sutra, where he is depicted as someone who never attained
enlightenment at all but was never without it.

As for Gotama Buddha, I have no way of knowing whether he ever attained
enlightenment. It is beyond my ability to verify or falsify the claim
that he did so. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that he did. And
let's also say that he did it in the way he said he did it. I'd describe
that as achieving what he achieved mostly through will power.

You have entirely missed the point of my previous message, however,
which is that 1) in accepting uncritically that the buddha was
enlightened, you are making a bald assertion of faith and not an
argument, and 2) the issue of the Buddha's enlightenment is a red
herring, for it has no connection whatsoever with the topic at hand,
which was the intrinsic power of mantras.

The Navajos have a saying that talking to some people is about as
fruitful as arguing with the winter wind. 

> Why do you differentiate between Shakyamuni and Gotama?

Because I'm careful not to conflate the Gotama myth with the Sakyamuni
myth that occurs about 1000 years later.

> And where does will power reside, if not in the mind?

Like every other mental thing, it originates in the central nervous
system of the body.

> If we reject faith we must reject all history, for I have to take it
> on faith even that I was myself alive yesterday!

I don't have enough faith to believe that you are alive even now. You
see, like everyone else, I believe only what I want to believe.

> Reciting mantras is pointless unless it helps attain Enlightenment!

Again you disagree with Dharmakirti, who says that mantras are useful
for healing diseases and other worldly things. If they work for worldly
purposes, why not use them for worldly purposes? 

> Do you believe there is some other reason that things work?

Yes, of course. I think abhidharmikas were on the right track when they
outlined a variety of types of cause. The world of experience is the
outcome of a complex network of different kinds of cause, some purely
mechanical and some psychological. To try to reduce everything to just
one kind of cause (such as faith or belief or mind) seems both
inaccurate and pointless.

Yes, I do think there is sometimes a point in being inaccurate. Anyone
who teaches anything accepts that it is sometimes preferable to
oversimplify, which is a form of inaccuracy, in order to prepare people
for more complex explanations to be given later. But I can see no
purpose at all being served by giving a simplistic view of causality.
Can you?

> Finally, for the compulsory Buddhist content, I would also query the ready
> dismissal of mantras as placebos etc by some people who probably have not
> tried using them.

My psychic powers suggest that this may be a veiled reference to
something I almost said. If so, there are two points that require
clarification. 

First, I did not dismiss mantras as placebos. I simply said that mantras
work for the same reason placebos work. They work when one believes in
them, not otherwise. Surely this is not a dismissal at all. On the
contrary, it is a testimonial to the profound effects of belief (or, as
some might prefer to call it, faith). 

Second, if you are suggesting that I have not tried using mantras, you
are mistaken. I have used them extensively in my meditation practice and
still do use them (on the very rare occasions when I meditate these
days). 

My own conviction about the efficacy of mantras stems from riding in the
passenger seat of a jeep in India one night. The driver, to save his
battery, had turned off his lights. The only light to be found was from
the glow of an elctric plastic Buddha on his dahsboard. I have never in
my life been so terrified, including the time when I woke up with a
scorpion on my bare chest. So in my terror I began chanting the Amitabha
mantra (since he is my best Buddha). Lo and behold, I didn't end up as
another pile of road kill on the highways of Maharashtra. The only
possible explanation is that the Amitabha mantra worked. 

Although I don't know if it qualifies as a mantra exactly, I have got
myself out of more than one very unpleasant frame of mind during times
of crisis by repeatedly reciting the opening lines of Nagarjuna's MMK.
And hardly an hour goes by in my average day in which I do not recite
"namo tassa bhagavato arahato sammaasambuddhassa" a few dozen times. 

Do mantras work? Yes, no doubt. Are they placebos? Yes, most probably.
(I don't think the namo tassa mantra would help a Muslim or a Christian
out of a tight spot as much as it helps me.) Do I dimiss either mantras
or placebos? God forbid.

> Without a 'natural relationship', as you put it, we would not expect
> random. We would expect to find all sorts of patterns based on the history,
> both social and philological, of languages and families of languages. The
> patterns found will be conventional not natural. Maybe Magnus has found some
> patterns, as would be expected, but they are not natural.

This is almost exactly what Indian Buddhists, such as Dignaga and
Dharmakirti, had to say about phonetic and phonemic elements in
sentences. Just by chance (if there is such a thing), I happened to read
the following chunk of good sense in Burton Watson's translation of
Xunzi (Hsün-tzu):

begin{quote}
 Names have no intrinsic reality. One agrees to use a certain name and
 issues an order that it shall be applied to a certain reality, and if
 the agreement is abided by and becomes a matter of custom, then it may
 be said to be a real name.
end{quote}

This is an excellent statement of just about exactly the same view that
D and Dh had. In arguing in this way, Dignaga and Dharmakirti repudiated
some of the claims of Mimamsikas that Vedic mantras have a special power
owing to intrinsic cosmic phonological correspondences. At the same
time, both of these fine fellows accepted as undisputed fact that
mantras work, not because of the power of words but because of the power
of the mind. For what it's worth, I think they got it right.

> BTW: Of COURSE mantras work because of the power of the mind, if they
> are uttered in the right frame of mind. They however work, in that
> case, because of the *frame of mind* they are uttered in, and not
> because of any power the mantras *themselves* might have!

It may seem obvious to you tht this is the case, and so you pompously
say "OF COURSE". It is worth noting, however, that the position you just
articulated was that of Dharmakirti and was ferociously attacked by the
Mimamsaka thinkers. So in their day the issue was controversial, and no
one could dismiss a philosophical rival by saying something as feeble as
"OF COURSE I'm right and my rival is nothing but a crippled temple
monkey." (Well, okay, both "Hindu" and Buddhist polemicists did say some
pretty uncharitable things about each other, but at least they
accompanied their derogatory rhetoric with attempts at good
argumentation. It were good if the denizens of BUDDHA-L would emulate
them in this respect.) 

> Nor is Kuukai a popular subject amongst our readers - 
> seems I have the wrong forum for an exploration of these ideas.

This forum is a suitable place for the discussion of any ideas
pertaining to the principles of Buddhism. But be warned that in
discussions some will question your assumptions, and others will ask
what any of these observations have to do with Buddhism. That people
challenge you does not make this the wrong forum, unless your goal is to
say whatever you feel like saying without having to answer any
embarrassing questions. 

> There  is  a  fascinating  question that has always puzzled me -but
> that  I  have never tried to answer- and it is how mantras are suppose
> to work, for example, how works the well known _Heart Sutra_'s mantra,
> "Gate gate paaragate paarasa.mgate bodhi svaahaa". If its effect is in
> the  word  level,  it  would  not have much effect on a Eskimo without
> Sanskrit  knowledge,  so  I  suppose  that  its  effect resides in the
> phoneme  and  rhythm level.

There is less to this problem than meets the ear. The fact is that this
mantra means nothing to someone who knows Sanskrit. It is ungrammatical
and absurd. So if it has any effect at all, it is similar to the placebo
effect. That is, it works if and only if one believes that it works, and
it works no matter how it is pronounced. To those of us who do not
believe in mantras, they have no effect whatseover, no matter who
pronounces them. (Actually I do believe in mantras to the extent that I
believe in placebos. But placebos rarely work if one KNOWS they are
placebos. So mantras don't work for me, because I know they are
placebos.)

> would an orally based Buddhist tradition, which eschewed the use of writing
> even when it was available, what would their basis of semiosis be?

The texts I have studied say that a spoken word is an audible sign that
can be used as the basis of an inference concerning what the speaker of
the word is thinking. So if you say "Fire," then if I know how you use
the word, I can infer that you are thinking about fire. A written word
is a visible symbol for an audible symbol. So the written word "fire" is
a sign of the spoken word "fire", which in turn is a sign for the
thought of fire. But it can be a sign only if one knows the conventions
of the user. So if you are a speaker of standard English, and I know
that, and I hear you say "fire", then I can infer that you are thinking
about fire. But if I hear someone who knows no English at all say
"fire", then I can make no reasonable inference about what he is
thinking about, just as when someone who knows no Sanskrit recites a
mantra, one cannot make a reasonable inference about what he is thinking
about.

> Other things I'm interested in exploring are what images the syllables 
> of mantras evoke in modern English speakers

The image a mantra evokes in me is that of a bunch of white-skinned
folks who have lost their own traditions and are desparately trying to
pretend they are Asians---or Africans or Navajos or something
interesting. It's a picture that is both funny and a little sad.

>    Do you have any comment?

Only to add that the Buddha reportedly said that if one must make a
choice between seeing body as self and mind as self, it makes much more
sense to see the body as self, since body changes takes place much more
slowly that mental changes. Of course, it is ultimately not a good idea
to regard anything as self, but until one is ready to jettison all
candidates, the least unreasonable candidate for the self is the body.

> Pain is to rupa as dukkha is to nama.

Not quite. Dukkha (pain) is to ruupa (body) as dommanassa (sadness,
unhappiness) is to samkhaara (mentality). Dukkha refers to both physical
pain and discomfort and the resulting mental conditions that are
unpleasant, such as anger, frustration, grief, melancholy and so on, all
of which are the effects of physical sensations. Or so it says in the
abhidharma texts I have studied.

> I recently posted something from the Pali canon that suggested that
> these questions, while wonderful to speculate about and argue about,
> tend not toward edification.

In posting that, you made the wisest contribution that has yet been made
on this much-overdiscussed and completely irrelevant topic. Perhaps
because it was wise, people have ignored it, thereby illustrating that
the Buddha was right when he said that the vast majority of people would
blithely ignore everything of value he had to say. To my way of
thinking, his decision to go ahead and teach the Dharma anyway ranks as
one of the biggest mistakes anyone in history has ever made, with the
possible exception of Jesus's decision to get crucified.

> Dukkha, as I understand it, has to do with the origin of misery, not
> the origin of consciousness, although consciousness is clearly one of
> the origins of misery.

Quite so. Remove consciousness, and misery will no longer arise. And
there is a way to remove consciousness, at least in the quantities
necessary to produce dukkha: stop breathing. If the central nervous
system is deprived of oxygen for long, it ceases to function. And then
consciousness disappears. And with it, dukkha.

Now this raises the age-old question "Why did the Buddha not recommend
suicide?" That's a question that is based on a false assumption. In
fact, the Buddha DID, in effect, recommend suicide. He called in
nirvana, but it comes to much the same thing. But the Buddha was wise
enough to know that most people actually LOVE dukkha, or at least are
willing to put up with a hell of a lot of it as the price to pay for
having all the other things they love, such as fun.

> I haven't been following this discussion at all closely, but don't you have
> this the wrong way around. Doesn't the Dharma suggest that matter arising
> in dependence on consciousness and not the other way around?

Dependent origination says only this: "If X arises when Y is present and
if X is absent when Y is absent, then X depends on Y." After that, it is
only a matter of observing things. Any conclusions about what is
dependent on what are only tentative and hypothetical at best. That is
the only Dharma I accept.

> The idea is that there is a statistical chance of a particle having a
> particular property (could be position, momentum, spin, etc) at any
> time - but when we observe the particle it is frozen into one of the
> possible states by the observation. In this case consciousness
> preceeds the physical state.

That is one hypothesis. As I understand it, that particular hypothesis
was rejected about fifty years ago by physicists, but it still enjoys
popularity among pseudo-scientific Buddhists.

> So you think that treating matter and consciousness as the same class of
> phenomena provides a wide enough framework - or scope - within which one
> can talk about dharma? Don't you feel that this may be somewhat limiting 
> from the outset?

Every framework is limiting if one is unwilling to consider any other.
As I have said at least one hundred times on BUDDHA-L, I have never
considered physicalism the only possible framework. I personally find it
the best, but I am perfectly willing to talk in other frameworks, if
they are more familiar to other people. I do not regard physicalism a
non-starter. Some other Buddhists apparently do, and many over the years
have freaked out at the very idea that one might teach Dharma within a
physicalist framework. So if anyone is limited, I would suggest those
folks are.

> Do you feel that one should limit one's investigations to what one
> feels at home with?

We should begin there. And if one remains comfortable, one should
remain there. After all, the only purpose of Buddhism is to eliminate
dukkha (discomfort). A good way to do that, I suggest, is to stay within
what feels as home for as long as one can.

You see, I don't feel one gets very many people interested in Dharma
practice if one begins by saying "Look, everything you believe is wrong.
If it weren't wrong, you wouldn't be here, a pathetic wretch that has
resulted from billions of previous delusory lives. If you feel
comfortable with what you believe, that is only because you are living
in a fool's paradise. Here, if you wish to be free from the delusion
that you are content with, let me cram some dogmas down your throat."

> The mystery is not preserved if it's equated to something with which we
> have familiarity through scientific investigation - namely, matter.

On the contrary. The world of matter is infinitely and delightfully mysterious.

> Indeed. Dukkha is overcome with the mind, not the microscope (probably).

No, dukkha is not overcome. The belief that it can be overcome is itself
one of its greatest causes. 

> If we state either one or other as a truth, it's tantamount to a belief.

Well, yes. I don't see anything wrong with having beliefs, so long as
one is aware that beliefs are provisional and may need to be changed if
and when new evidence comes in. I take this so much for granted that I
rarely make it a point of saying before every sentence I write "It is
currently by opinion that...."

> And I think the important thing is to 'still be working on it'.
> That's why I don't dismiss rebirth - I haven't finished yet.

That states very nicely exactly the way I see things. I am still
thinking about these issues and probably always will be. For now I see
no evidence whatsoever for rebirth and much evidence against it. But I
have not dismissed it. I just remain disinclined to accept it. And as a
Buddhist teacher, I tend not to speak about anything that I cannot speak
about with conviction, so my tendency is either to avoid the issue or
say something like "The texts say...." (I do, after all, know what the
texts say, even though I may be disinclined to believe that what they
say is true.")

> While you carefully used the word 'implication' rather than 'result',  I
> detected a tendency to use an internal model (i.e. the implication) as a
> basis for influencing future events.  This model would have been arrived
> at through past observations, presumably.

Yes, of course. How else could one make decisions about how to act?
I take it that what one normally does is to study the consequences that
appear to have resulted from previous events, to form hypotheses about
which of the large complex of factors were relevant, and then to
formulate tentative principles about how to act when more-or-less
similar circumstances appear to have arisen again. At every step of this
procedure there is a great deal of room for error. Events are complex
beyond our wildest imagination, and the chances that one has
successfully identified the relevant factors that shaped the course of
future events and formulated the right principles from them are rather
modest. This is why so much that happens in the world seems so much like
blind luck. In fact, I am rather drawn to some of the arguments in the
late Bernard Williams's book, _Moral Luck_. (I have not yet read the
book; I have only read reviews that make it sound like the sort of book
I would probably enjoy reading. So I have formed a tentative hypothesis
that I will benefit from the book and have ordered it. I am assuming,
on the basis of past experiences, that the book will eventually get to me,
and am hoping, despite previous experiences, that I will actually have
time to read it.)

> Accepting it as valid for the future must entail something akin to belief.

I would call it more akin to hypothesis formation and testing. Of course
there is something very much like confidence or trust involved in
thinking that forming hypotheses and testing them is preferable to, say,
blindly and uncritically accepting what an authority figure has told one
to believe. The principal reason I was (and still am) drawn to Buddhism
is that it seems to me (perhaps wrongly) to be a path based on
hypothesis testing than an authoritarian path.

> What seems to be different between this and a belief in rebirth is
> that, in the former, one trusts that one's observations enable one to
> 'join up the dots', so to speak.

Most people who are realistic have a very modest confidence in their
ability to join up the dots. Indeed, I would say that the more confident
a person is that he has correctly connected all and only the right
selection of dots, the less I am inclined to put my trust in him. Such a
person, I have found, is prone to acting rashly. (I am wondering why 
all of a sudden such names as George W. Bush and Tony Blair have come to
mind.)

>  Our -self it would not be possible. It is the teaching of dependent
> origination.

You're quite right. The teaching of dependent origination is that there
is no need to invoke the concept of a self to account for experience. It
was left to later Buddhist philosophers to argue (with some degree of
success) that the very idea of a self is at best useless and and worst
undermined by contradictions embedded in the arguments made in favor of
it. So as a follower of dependent origination, I steer clear of talking
about a self, except at the purely conventional level.

> To inoculate the non-rebirth inside Buddhist philosophy will be a
> mistake. Philosophically is illogical, some people will discover by
> his own experience and also the inquisition no longer exists. It
> doesn't have any future.

No one that I know about has injected the non-rebirth philosophy into
Buddhism. Some of us have discovered that it is perfectly easy to talk
about causality, moral responsibility, mindfulness, the cultivation of
universal compassion and the cessation of dukkha without any mention
whatsoever of rebirth. Or of Mount Meru. There is nothing illogical
involved in talking about all these things without mentioning rebirth.
My experience during some thirty-five years of practicing meditation and
following the precepts has certainly not led me to discover that the
doctrine of rebirth is the best hypothesis. I pray there will not be any
Buddhist Inquisitions, even in Spain. And we'll see about the future
when it gets here. My guess is that Buddhism will do rather well in the
West and that some of the successful forms will have very little or no
concern with the doctrine of rebirth. For many Buddhists I know (and
this includes a good many Japanese and Korean Buddhists) it is simply a
non-issue.

> I hope you don't meet with the guy who appears in that moment,
> he doesn't seem friendly.

I have never had much difficulty being friendly with people. If they do
not reciprocate, that's acceptable to me. I assume they are working with
a lot of painful conditioning that prevents them from being friendly.
Perhaps things will change for them. Perhaps not. Perhaps my own
friendliness toward them will be a factor in things changing for the
better for them. Perhaps not. One tries. One often fails.

> I'm not arguing against preference. I say that the reasons given against
> the rebirth hypothesis apply equally to the day-to-day hypothesis.

If by this you mean that no one has yet come up with a knock-down
argument that decides the issue definitively, I quite agree. That is why
I have always maintained that the wisest course of action is to let
individuals take whichever position works best for them. For me (as
pretty well everyone now knows), I just cannot make the rebirth
hypothesis work for me. I know many people for whom it works very well,
and I have never (if memory serves me well) tried to persuade them that
they are wrong. All I have ever done is to try to talk to others whose
mentality is similar to mine and who wonder whether it is possible to
practice Buddhism, and to achieve all the goals of Buddhist practice,
without believing in rebirth. And, if others have tried to say that what
I am doing is illegitimate, then I have tried to show them that my
project is perfectly legitimate and perfectly Buddhist.

> One creates causes because one has confidence that the effects
> will be free of dukkha. One doesn't really know which dots join up.

If abhidharma is correct, all events are related to all other events.
The causal nexus is complex beyond our ability to comprehend or imagine.
Therefore, any time we say that A is a cause of B, we are
oversimplifying and distorting. So one could say that dependent
origination is a kind of distortion, even a lie. The question is: is it
a useful lie? I think so. I have found it so. I have not found the
doctrine of rebirth equally useful. So I prefer to think in terms of
causality without necessarily accepting rebirth as entailed by it. 

Now pudgalavaadins, as I understand them, argue that one must posit a
strange entity known as a pudgala (person) to account for rebirth. Far
from questioning rebirth, they feel it is important to give an adequate
account of it, and they feel the account in classical Buddhism was not
adequate. They also argued that there must be some person who enters
nirvana. So I see them as more akin to eternalists, rather like those
who argued in favor of tathaagata-garbha. And I therefore see them as
falling somewhat short of the standard set for being an adherent of the
middle path. Some kinds of secular Buddhists may also fail to meet the
standard (which, after all, only arhants can really meet anyway), but
their failure is importantly different from the failure of
pudgalavaadins. Or so it seems to me.

>> Various people have said in various ways that if one needs a reason to
>> be virtuous, then one is not yet capable of being virtuous. To speak of
>> virtue as a practice that one does for some personal reason (such as
>> having a better rebirth) just cheapens the whole idea of virtue.
>
> If one moves from the practice of non-virtue to virtue, would it be rash
> to assume there's a reason?

Yes, of course. But note that I qualified the expression by saying
"personal reason." I take it that a person could easily decide to be
virtuous for no other reason than that other beings seem to prefer to be
treated virtuously, others prefer not to be harmed and so forth. If a
person observes that virtue is preferred by most sentient beings, then
one might very well decide to be virtuous even if doing so might at
times be personally inconvenient. That, I take it, would be quite a
different attitude than calculating that one is most likely to get what
one wants from others by being (or seeming to be) nice to them.

> From a practical perspective I also think that is better to be
> virtuous with a motive than not be virtuous at all.

If one is being virtuous with a personal motive, then one is perhaps not
being virtuous at all. But one is at least pretending to be virtuous,
and acting "as if" one is virtuous may be the best way to accomplish the
task of eventually being actually virtuous.

I take it that precepts usually begin as rules for how one ought to act,
then become guidelines for how one tries to act, and finally become
descriptions of how one automatically acts.

> It seems to me that ol' Mal was what William James called a
> "rationalist". .... There is nothing whatever wrong with that -- this
> kind of mind is very  common amongst us sentient beings and have
> resulted in a great deal of great art, philosophy, religion and other
> swell things.

Hey, don't forget to mention things like war and slavery and
Fundamentalism. All of them can, I think, be traced to diseased forms of
rationalism (which is to suggest, deliberately, that there are healthy
forms of that beast.) As a rationalist in remission, and a would-be
Jamesian pluralist and Peircean Pramgaticist, I now celebrate the muting
of my once-robust rationalistic proclivities.

Last night, after another exhilarating day of teaching both Chinese
philosophy and a course in critical thinking, I began to reflect on how
tedious I find Indian and Tibetan philosophy and how inspiring I find
Confucius and Mencius and their critics. The Chinese, it seems to me,
got down to the business of talking about how to be a human being,
whereas the Indians got sidetracked with pseudo-issues, such as how to
avoid becoming a human being again. Being only human, I prefer the
Chinese line of inquiry. I think the Chinese got Gotama about right,
while the Indians butchered him, and the Tibetans served up the
butchered buddha in a stew of uncountable scholastic trivialities.

And I suppose my fondness of human sapience is also why I vastly prefer
this-worldly American Pragmatist Buddhism to Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, most
of which strikes me as hopelessly anal-retentive and obsessive.

> However, I would be curious to know what The Blessed One thought about
> this line of questioning.

I think he would say something like this: "The more I think of these
questions, the less I think of them."

> *Sigh* Very well. What adjective would you like me to use to indicate
> those who prefer the temporal and worldly to the sacred and eternal?

I think that is a false dichotomy. One can be interested both in the
worldly and the sacred if one considers the world sacred. A word that I
would use for someone who considers the world sacred is "Buddhist."

In works such as Dharmottara's "Para-loka-siddhi", the task is to prove
that there are lives after this one (for everyone but arhants). People
who are said to deny para-loka in Buddhist contexts are invariably (so
far as I know) said to deny 1) that they may have a next life after the
current one ends, and 2) that they have any moral responsibility for
their actions. The assumption seems to be that if one has no PERSONAL
stake in the future, one will not care to be responsible for how one
acts now. That is how classical Buddhist texts deal with this issue.
Never, so far as I know, is there a concern with the issue of prefering
the temporal and worldly or restricting one's knowledge to the five
senses and reason.

Now as for the classical Buddhist claim that one who has no personal
stake in the future is incapable of being responsible for the long-term
consequences of actions in the current life, I think that traditional
Buddhist claim is demonstrably silly. It is, as Jim Peavler and others
have pointed out, a piece of silliness on a par with the claim of some
Christians that one cannot be concerned with the welfare of others
unless one believes in God.

> I think he is setting out what buddhism may look like if one chooses
> to prefer the temporal and worldly over the sacred and eternal.

Why not take Batchelor at his word? All he says is that he wishes to
talk about Buddhism without overstepping the bounds of experience and
reason. But any Buddhist would say that, I think. At least any Buddhist
from the traditions with which Batchelor practiced for many years as a
monk would say that.

> In any case, I think you have summed up the issue nicely. What kind of
> buddhism appeals to those persons who are bound by their five senses
> and reason?

Well, I would say that Indian Buddhism would appeal to such people. All
the Indian Buddhists of whom I am aware said that there are only two
sources of knowledge: direct experience through the six senses (the five
external senses plus the sense of internal emotional states), and
reasoning based on what one has experienced. What else is there beyond
that? Revelation from an omniscient god? So some claimed, but they were
firmly and unequivocally repudiated by Buddhists.

> I think at best they will eventually end up, under the
> force of reasoning conjoined with limited experience, denying rebirth
> as necessary, denying liberation as necessary, denying ritual as
> necessary, denying discipline as necessary.

A counterexample to your claim would be Dharmakiirti. He allowed nothing
but sense experience and reason, and he ridiculed those who claimed to
know anything beyond what they experience and what they can reasonably
infer from what they have experienced. Yet he also affirmed rebirth and
liberation and discipline. I'm not sure where he stands on ritual. He
doesn't say.

Now Batchelor, as I read him, is very much like Dharmakiirti, except
that Batchelor does not think a case can be made for rebirth. (Actually,
Dharmakiirti also finally concludes that the most one can conclude is
that rebirth is possible, not that it is necessary.) So Batchelor is
willing to say "Since I am not in a position of knowing whether or not
rebirth occurs, let me not speak of that. Let me speak instead of what I
am in a position of knowing about." And in saying that, Batchelor is, I
would claim, very much in line with the majority of Indian Buddhists and
Zen Buddhists.

> For those who are interested in buddhadharma in particular, did the
> buddha suggest that an approach based upon such preferences would lead
> to the cessation of dukkha? Did he ever suggest a contrary position may
> have merit?

Yes, he did. Once when he was asked whether followers of other schools
could be liberated, he said that he did not know for sure. He would have
to live with them and observe them carefully for a long time before he
could answer such a question. This suggests to me that he was at least
open to the possibility that followers of other systems could be fully
liberated. As to preferences, he clearly said that some people prefer
study and learning, while others prefer stilling the mind through
meditative absorption, and still others prefer devotion and service. All
three approaches can lead to full liberation, he said. The path that one
should follow is the path that one prefers on the basis of his
conditioning. So I think the Buddha was quite a bit more open-ended than
most of his later disciples were capable of being.

> What exactly does buddhism bring to the occidental understanding of
> the temporal and worldly realm that those who prefer the temporal and
> worldly may feel it lacks?

Buddhism brings absolutely nothing to occidental UNDERSTANDING. The
Buddha said nothing that various Greeks and Chinese did not say at about
the same time in history. What Buddhism does offer is a very good method
of cultivating positive mental states, and this method is, I would
claim, a large part of why Westerners have turned to Buddhism. There is
nothing quite like the specific techniques of sati-pa.t.thaana and
mettaa-bhaavanaa in Greek or early philosophy. Somewhat similar
practices do occur within Christianity, but they are based on doctrinal
assumptions that make many contemporary Western people uncomfortable. So
many contemporary occidentals would rather practice meditation in a Zen
or Vipassanaa setting than in a Benedictine or Franciscan monastery.

> Well, I am not suggesting that Batchelor is not a thoughtful writer.
> Still, you have yet to show how he considers anything other than this
> world.

No, I will not try to show that he considers anything outside of sensual
experience and reason. In fact, like almost all other Buddhists of the
traditions in which he has practiced, he finds it potentially harmful to
pretend to know anything outside sense experience and reason. It is
because I know the Indian tradition pretty well and because I know
Batchelor pretty well that I can come to see him as one of the most
articulate spokesmen alive of the traditional Indian and Zen Buddhist
intellectual traditions. He is a rare combination of an excellent
scholar and an excellent thinker. In addition, he is a profoundly warm
and kind-hearted man and an excellent meditation teacher. All of this
makes him pretty good in my eyes. This is not to say others are not also
good in all these ways. Of course they are. So I would say (in my more
careful moments) that Batchelor is among the very best, not that he is
the very best.

>>This is not such a bizarre idea. One man cannot build a pyramid, but
>>several tens of thousands working together can.
>
>Of course - more of the same functionality, as I said.

So you agree with me that one neuron's limited intelligence, when combined
with the limited intelligence of a few billion comrades, contributes to an
inteliigence far greater than that of any one nueron alone. Et voila! 
That is how consciousness arises from matter! Mysterious? Yes, of course. 
But no more mysterious than it would be to posit that consciousness arises 
out of itself or out of nothing.

> Add more memory to a computer and one can get more processing power, but
> it doesn't make it conscious!

How do you know? How can anyone know whether anything, other than
perhaps oneself, is conscious?

> And I note how you've now used the word 'intelligence' and then moved
> on to consciousness.  Do you think they are interchangeable?

Yes, in that both terms are so capable of a multiplicity of definitions
that there is no consensus whatsoever on what either one means. I am
reminded of the big interdisciplinary consciousness project that started
up some years ago. After years of haggling, the project was disbanded,
because no one had the faintest idea what consciousness is. If one
cannot even agree on a definition of what one is going to study, one
cannot study it.

> I've not put up any evidence or reasoning against it, yet. All I've said
> is that if one puts a lot of stuff together, one gets a pile of the same
> stuff. I questioned how some other type of stuff might arise from this.

That's a good question. It remains unanswered, just like the question of
how consciousness can arise from anything other than matter. Face it,
consciousness is a huge mystery. The good news is that one need not
solve the mystery before one gets down to serious business practising
dharma. Indeed, the less time one spends worrying about it and trying to
solve it, the sooner one can get down to serious dharma practice. 
That's why what I recommend is that everyone just accept whatever views about
consciousness and rebirth and all that other irrelevant crap they feel
like accepting and then run with their views right onto the eightfold
path. And my recommendation is that once one gets onto the path, one not
stop until one gets to the goal. (Of course, I deny that anyone has ever
reached the goal or that anyone can, but that's a bedtime story for
another night.)

>> So now I'm interested in seeing to what
>> extent one can present a Buddhist abhidharma in phyiscalist terms.
>
> Isn't that what the Dalai Lama and his Western scientist friends have
> been trying to do over the past 15 years or so? Porting abhidharma to a
> western, largely physicalist, platform?

Yes, it is. That's at least part of the reason why I don't find it such
an outrageous project. When the Dalai Lama was in Montreal about ten
years ago he remarked that abhidharma got frozen about 1400 years ago,
when people's knowledge of science was abysmal. He opined that it would
be a tragedy for Buddhism to get stuck with a medieval pre-scientific
view of the world. I think he's right.

> To my mind, what differentiates virtue from non-virtue is the intention.

No way of talking about virtue is without its problems. To measure an
action by its outcomes is difficult, because every action participates
in a complex network of actions and contributes to a tangle of results
that makes it impossible to point to any one action and say "Here are
its consequences. Now, are they good or bad?"

The problem with intentions is that it is not clear who gets to say what
an agent's intentions are. Does the agent get to say "These were my
intentions?" Perhaps, but it is notoriously easy for an agent to be
mistaken about his true intentions, especially if one takes unconscious
motivations into account.

> If the intentions are virtuous, there will be constant scrutiny of those
> intentions to eliminate selfish motives.

Yes, we would all like to think this is what we do.

> If they are found, does it mean that the practice was, on reflection,
> non-virtuous?

This question is impossible to answer unless one has a clear criterion
of what counts as virtue. If one looks only at intentions, and if one
does not regard selfish motivations to be virtuous, then any action with
a selfish motivation would fail to be virtuous.

> I think it would be a virtuous practice to uncover and overcome those
> selfish motives but it doesn't necessarily mean that the original
> action was, at the time, non-virtuous.

It depends on how you reckon virtue. I am inclined to accept the
Buddhist notion that any action that is truly good for others
(paraartha) is also good for oneself (svaartha). This means that
altruism is good for oneself. Does this mean that I should studiously
avoid all altruistic actions, lest I be aware of doing something good
for myself?

> Therefore, on this basis, I would say that one moves from the practice
> of non-virtue to virtue using reason.

Pretty well everyone in the history of European, Indian and Chinese
thought would agree with you here. You would certainly get no argument
from me on this point.

>> You could also refer to Nagarjuna, who
>> echoes the Buddha in saying that those whounderstand dependent orgination
>> correctly do not think in terms of past lives and future lives.
>
> Quote(s)? Do they think in terms of present lives?

They do not think of any life as "my" life. And without thinking of any
life as "my" life the whole enterprise of rebirth crumbles. Rebirth
makes sense only when one sees a continuity between one specific past
life, one specific present life, and one specific future life, all these
lives identified as belonging to the same "person" or "self". Once one
sees dependent origination correctly (if I understand it rightly), all
these notions of person give way to a much wider concept of process.
When one studies abhidharma, one learns that every dharma of the past is
a cause of a present dharma. If that is the case, then "I" am the effect
of Napoleon, Jesus of Nazareth, David Hume and Adolph Hitler; "I" am the
present life of every past life that has ever existed and am in turn the
cause of every life that will ever be lived in the future. So to single
out any one life from the past and to say "I was Louis Pasteur but not
Marquis de Sade" would be arbitrary and false. So the common notion of
rebirth flies out the window with a correct understanding of dependent
origination.

> However, we can assign rebirth to the Buddhist doctrine in happy way
> because there are thousand of mentions to it. None supporting non-rebirth.

So what's your point? Are you saying that if something is said in a Buddhist
text it must be true? So areyou recommending that I trade in all my maps and
globes that do not show Jambudvipa to be a central continent surrounded by
seas and other continents?

> Excepting the speech from the point of view of the lack of inherent
> existence, it would be contradictory with Buddha's teaching seeing any
> Buddhist philosopher talking about the arising and death of the beings
> using non-rebirth.

You need to read both Buddhaghosa and Vasubandhu. They both offer a way of
understanding dependent origination without any reference to rebirth. You
might also read Bhikkhu Buddhadasa. You could also refer to Nagarjuna, who
echoes the Buddha in saying that those who understand dependent origination
correctly do not think in terms of past lives and future lives.

> I do the same with non-rebirth. I was educated to believe in
> non-rebirth in all the senses. Across time, even before I have found
> Buddhism, I saw this more illogical; until today. Actually I see
> non-rebirth a complete falsehood.

This proves there is no truth to the matter on this particular issue. 
There are only beliefs, and for none of them are there compelling proofs.
Therefore, it is best to let each person believe what he finds most
congenial.

> Anyone can choose his own masters, although seeing the background of
> this, I wish you the best luck.

If I ever feel a need to be a slave, I shall seek a master.

> Monks have told me that though they didn't feel it was necessary to believe
> in re-birth, they felt they had to teach it because it would make a
> difference in the way those they taught led their lives.  They would be more
> likely to live ethical lives if they thought there would be consequences,
> even if they couldn't see them now.
>
> I first heard this argument for teaching re-birth from a very senior monk at
> Wat Suan Mokh, Aj. Bhuddaddasa's monastery.
>
> I was appalled.

Thanks for sharing your appallment with us, Randall. You didn't say
exactly why you were appalled, but my reason for being appalled is the
patronizing and condescending attitude of the monk who seems to believe
that people would not be moral unless someone told them some pretty
lies. I have, on a few isolated occasions, met people who have told me
that they would not be moral unless they believed they would go to hell
for being immoral. My advice to them (on the unlikely eventuality that
they should ever ask for it) would be to continue believing in hell
until they can find a better reason to be moral, or until they can be
moral without needing a reason.

> The obvious problem is: if the illusion of the self is stopped
> completely because death, the individual consciousness would not exist
> and human beings we would be like the animals, which also have senses
> and a nervous system but they doesn't have individual consciousness.

I doubt that any of us humans is in a position to speculate on what
animals do and do not have in the way of consciousness.

> If enlightenment is the break with the illusion of the death, that
> claims is like saying the death is equal to the complete
> enlightenment.

Although I detest the word "enlightenment," I should think that
enlightenment is possible only in a conscious mind. When an enlightened
mind dies, it ceases to be enlightened and just becomes a former mind
that has now ceased to exist.

> It is so obvious.

It is nowhere near as obvious as you claim. If it were obvious, there
would be no disputing what is the case. But people have been speculating
about this for millennia without anyone coming close to making a
definitive case. 

> It would seem reasonable to me to pay particular attention to situations
> where strong attachments arise.  Death is one of them - perhaps the most
> significant of all.

I agree. If one can accept the fact that death is the end of
consciousness, then one can face it without fear. If one cannot, then
one will die with regrets. The nice thing about death is that no one is
ever disappointed. Those who falsely believed that they would survive it
(such as those who think they will go to heaven immediately after
blowing themselves and a busload of infidels up) do not have to live to
face their disappointment.

> Death needs to be addressed.

Fortunately, we all get one chance to address it. How to you plan to
address it? By saying "Hello, Death. What took you so long?" Or by
falling to your knees and saying "Please, Death, just give me one more
hour."

> What comes after it needs to be addressed.

Why? I honestly can't wee what good comes of addressing this issue. I
guess I am more inclined to agree with what Confucius said when someone
asked him what comes after death: "You do not yet understand life. So
what is the point of trying to understand death?"

> It *is* a conceptual problem

Only if one is determined to see it as a problem that requires being
thought about. If one does not see death as a problem and does not think
about it, then it is not at all a conceptual problem, is it? 

>> I agree. If one can accept the fact that death is the end of
>> consciousness [snip] Those who falsely believed that they would survive it
>
> How do you *know* that this is the case rather than your own predilections
> and needs leading you to believe that such is the case ?   One might, as you
> imply you do, "accept" this view but it still does not necessarily make it
> true.

Yes, of course. There is no way that I know of to know for certain what
happens after death. That's why it is so utterly pointless to speculate
about it or to stipulate what others should or should not believe about
it. I suspect that most of us opt for the views that 1) are most in
accord with the evidence we have available to us, which is to some
extent determined by the prejudices we have about what counts as
evidence in the first place, and 2) give us most comfort. Happily for
me, the view that gives me most comfort is also the one that seems most
likely, given what I know of physiology, to be true.

> Surely it would be safer, as others have suggested in the past, to
> believe that some form of post-mortem continuity occurs ?

Why is that safer? Safer compared to what? What is the danger in being
mistaken?

> If you are right, then little is lost but if you are wrong ....

I'm afraid I cannot see what dire consequences would happen if I were
wrong. If I am wrong, then my consciousness will continue to exist after
my body dies. So what? I can, if you'll pardon the expression, live with
that possibility. I am not so attached to being right about everything
that I would feel chagrin to discover that I was wrong about the
afterlife. It would be no worse that expecting not to be able to find a
parking spot and then finding one.

> I think that when I die my body will be reduced to ashes and 
> my mental continnum will stop.

I also feel that it is most likely that my mental continuum will stop,
but I would prefer my body to become food for maggots, coyotes and
bobcats. I feel a deep serenity whenever I see a bunch of ants eating
the body of a dead beetle, for it reminds me that, as the Upanishad says
"I am food! I am food! I am food!" It would be a pity of someone with a
body as large as mine were not to re-enter the food chain. 

As for thoughts, ideas and intellectual properties, they are much more
transient and worth much less than food. Since they do not last even
until one's body dies, who could possibly be concerned about their not
being produced any longer once the body dies?

> Some nihilists may well face death without fear. People can suspend 
> fear for a short time,  but that doesn't mean an end to suffering because 
> the causes remain. It's a short-term reliance on ignorance.

What you are saying is short-term reliance on dogmatism. You have no way
of knowing whether the dogma is correct. You are entitled to follow it,
but in so doing, try not to be smug. 

> Don't you address the causes of suffering, so suffering doesn't arise 
> in the future?

Yes, and that is why I do my best to live in such a way that the world
that future generations inherit will not cause them too much pain and
conflict.

>    I agree with you, after some thinking about _dukkha_ I have come to
> understand  it  as  the "non acceptance of what is being experienced"

Yes, this is very close to what the Buddha himself had to say about
dukkha, which is that it is having what one does not want and not having
what one wants. Nothing could be more basic than that. So nirvana, it
seems to me, has nothing at all to do with rebirth but rather with
learning not to wish for anything. If one has no wishes, then one cannot
be disappointed. There is nothing at all difficult to understand about
all that, so I cannot see how the issue could possibly be one of failing
to understand. It is not a conceptual problem, nor is it is matter of
having the right sort of belief. It is a question of will, not of
understanding.

Speaking only for myself, I am not willing to give up desires. Some of
them are fulfilled, and some are not. I am willing to take my chances
and have learned not to get particularly excited about whether things go
as I had hoped they would. I guess such an attitude might disqualify me,
in the eyes of some, from being entitled to wear a Buddhist label. But
somehow I just can't seem to get upset about that.

> Isn't it also an attachment to continued unconsciousness/non-existence?

The kle"sa known as bhava comprises both attachment to continued
consciousness and attachment to discontinued consciousness. Normally
when things are going well, one tends to wish for continued
consciousness. When the going gets tough, one wishes for a
discontinuity. Both wishes are included in bhava.

> "...I wonder how far one can pare down the Buddha's teachings
> according to one's personal inclinations and still honestly call oneself a
> Buddhist..."

My experience has been somewhat different. I have never had the
slightest hesitation in calling myself a Buddhist. Over the years I have
known dozens of people who have questioned how I can do it, given that I
don't appear to them to believe much of anything that Buddhists are
supposed to believe. I see that as their problem, not mine. Let them
wrestle with whether I am meeting their standards of honesty. Meanwhile,
I have more important tasks to get on with than grappling with whether I
am wearing the right labels according to the standards of other people.

> In that context, teachings on rebirth become meaningless
> if one has no concern about what happens beyond the grave, whatever form
> that takes.

What you say makes sense, Mike, but I would want to add that plenty of
people care very much about what happens after they die, even if they
don't expect to be there to experience the future personally. I would
say that someone who has no concern whatsoever for the well-being and
happiness of other beings in the present and no concern whatsoever for
beings who will live in the future would find much of Buddhist teaching
meaningless. That sort of person would be coming pretty near the extreme
of uccheda-vaada (cessationism) or naasti-vaada (nihilism) as those
terms were defined by the Buddha.

> I've yet to find such a person.

I think I have known a few people who seemed to operate in that very
negative mode much of the time, but I doubt very much that anyone is
always negligent of the well-being of others.

> For others, I suggest that consideration of rebirth in the right
> way will actually release concern about this life.

Perhaps, but I think an abiding concern for others is a more "primitive"
human sense than is the belief in rebirth. That is, I can easily
envision one having profound friendship (maitrii) and compassion without
having any belief in rebirth at all. So compassion is not a product of a
belief in rebirth. Rather, I think compassion is more basic and
elemental, and rebirth more a matter of specific conditioning and
indoctrination.

> That doesn't mean one should 'buy' it, but I think one should at least
> borrow it for a while.

I think one may benefit by the dogma of rebirth, whether one buys it,
borrows it or steals it. But it is going too far to say that one should
appropriate it. Why not leave it as an option that one can either
acquire or leave aside as a accompaniment to the more essential and far
more important quality of compassion?

> The last time Rizong Rinpoche taught at our Centre, he spoke on rebirth.
> It had been his observation that those who had held to the philosophy of
> rebirth died more peacefully than those who had not.

Statements such as that are almost perfectly meaningless. I suggest that
Rinpoche, like most of us, sees what he wants to see, perhaps even sees
what he needs to see. But how possible is it to determine how peacefully
another dies? And what difference does it make whether or not one dies
peacefully? Death is but one episode in life. I'm much more interested
in knowing how a person lives than how he or she dies. And MY
observation (which reflects only what I want to see, and perhaps need to
believe) is that there is almost no correlation at all between what
people believe and how they live. Any belief can attend a peaceful,
joyous and productive life. And any belief can attend a tumultuous,
miserable and destructive life. So how can one conclude that beliefs are
part of the conditions that determine the quality of one's life?

>  I think that if one uses the philosophy of rebirth correctly, it
> enables one to let go.

And if one lets go properly, one need not use the philosophy of rebirth
at all. If one knows how to let go, then any philosophy at all can serve
one well. If one cannot let go, then no philosophy in the world will
offer much help.

> My understanding, for what it's worth, probably not much, is that craving is
> based on delusion--delusion that the objects of my attachments/love are
> permanent, or that what I want to happen or think ought to happen will
> happen, and that the satisfaction of my cravings will satisfy, ending the
> thirst.

I think that is the standard Buddhist view. I also think it's probably
wrong, or at least oversimplified. It is just about impossible for me to
believe that there are people out there who really believe that objects
are permanent. I have never had such a belief. It seems a straw man to
me. The issue, I think, is nothing at all to do with understanding but
with acceptance. Very few people are in denial about death. Everyone
knows he or she will die. But few people are happy about the
inevitability of their own death. The country singer Johnny Cash stated
it well when he sang "I don't like it, but I guess things happen that
way." That's all there is to it, really. We know what's in store for us,
and we don't much like it. All the knowledge and understanding in the
world will not change the brute fact that we don't much like quite a lot
of what is real and inevitable.

> The 4 noble truths tell me that it's not so, and my experience confirms
> them.

You're lucky. My experience confirms the first two noble truths and
refutes the second two. The Buddha gets a 50% in my book. I wish he had
scored 100%. That would have been nice. But nothing that I have ever
experienced gives me confidence that he deserves a higher grade. I don't
like it, but I guess things happen that way.

> How can it be known for sure - and not merely believed, as an article
> of faith - that the Moon really exists ... independently, that is, of
> the perception or concept thereof?

The desire to know anything for sure is a cause of dukkha. The wise
therefore learn to be content with good guesses.

> it  seems  obvious  to  me that every living being is subject to
> birth,  aging  and  death.  Is it possible to escape from this kind of
> dukkha?

If one buys the commonly accepted Indian premise that sentient beings
will continue to be reborn so long as they resist discontinuity, then it
follows that rebirth is unavoidable to those who wish to continue
existing in some form or another. Those of us who do not accept the
ancient belief in rebirth have to reinterpret the goal of Buddhism
somewhat. We are more inclined to say that the goal of Buddhism is not
to avoid rebirth, but rather to learn to accept death without fear. One
cannot possibly avoid getting old (except by dying young), but one can
accept old age with grace and dignity.

> In the same way it seems impossible to me that
> any  person  can  avoid  "association with the unbeloved", "separation
> from  the  loved"  or  "nor  geeting what is wanted". How do you think
> these points must be understood?

If one stops having strong preferences and accepts what is rather than
hankering for what ought to be, then one's level of frustration will
surely be reduced. If one loves nothing, then one is never separated
from the beloved. If one has no ideals, then reality will always be
acceptable. Buddhism is indistinguishable from Stoicism in this respect.

Now I personally am quite unwilling to give up loving and having ideals.
So for me the goal of Buddhism is to accept without complaint all the
pain I suffer when I am separated from loved ones and when militant
Republicans bent on "full spectrum domination" almost get elected to the
White House. When a loved one dies, for example, I try to see my grief
as a wonderful reminder of previous joy. Remembering joy can itself
bring light to the heart.

> Has there ever been any attempt to date the Buddha's bone/tooth
> relics by scientific means such as the carbon method?

What would be the point? If it should turn out that the bones and teeth
are those of a fourth century groundhog, people would only lose faith in
a generic sort of way. The value of the Buddha's story lies entirely in
its mythic and symbolic representations. It has no historic or
scientific value whatsoever.

> Could such relics still contain genetic material suitable for DNA
> analysis?

Are you worried that the Buddha may not have been Rahula's biological
father? Or that Devadatta and Ananda were not really his cousins? Again,
I would ask what the point would be.

> "Whatever is thought of by us is either conceived through itself, or
> involves the concept of another. Whatever is involved in the concept of
> another is again either conceived through itself, or involves the
> concept of another; and so on. So one must either proceed to infinity,
> or all thoughts are resolved into those which are conceived through
> themselves. If nothing is conceived through itself, nothing could be
> conceived at all." (Leibniz 1973[1679])" >
> In the opinion of this esteemed assembly, is Leibnitz referring to the
> question in Buddhist debates of direct perception? 

I am not sure whether Leibniz was repeating observations made by
Buddhists in general, but he certainly made observations consistent with
some Buddhists in India.

Dignaaga (5th century) and Dharmakiirti (7th century) and their
followers made exactly the same argument as Leibniz (17-18th centuries)
made for the conclusion that every act of cognition is aware of both
itself and its object. The fact that every act of awareness is aware of
itself, they claimed, is the experiential basis of the illusion that
there is a permanent self. And the fact that every self-aware cognition
also has an object that feels as though it is coming into the cognition
from the outside is the experiential basis of the illusion that objects
of experience are external to cognition. Getting rid of the delusions
that feed frustration (du.hkha), according to them, consists in
realizing through reasoning that experience misleads us. Reason corrects
experience by showing that 1) the self cannot be permanent even though
it feels as if it is, and 2) objects are not external to consciousness,
and therefore not "other" relative to the "self," even though they
appear to be.

> Both of you seem to be offering the same explanation:  Kleshas can be
> eliminated from the consciousness continuum because they are dependently
> arising. Therefore all sentient beings can become enlightened.

That is almost what I would say, except that I am not much inclined to
talk about enlightenment. I am more inclined to say that consciousness
is conditioned and will disappear when the conditions that support it
cease. And the kleshas are also conditioned, and they will disappear
when the conditions that support them cease. But since the conditions
that make the kleshas arise are not identical to the conditions that
make consciousness arise, it is possible for all the conditions that
support the kleshas to cease whole the conditions that support
consciousness remain. When that happens, then consciousness is free of
kleshas, a condition that is known as nirvana.

> There is, of course another premise in the argument 
> which is implied rather than stated:
> When kleshas are eliminated, consciousness is enlightened consciousness.

Again, I find the term "enlightenment" unnecessary. I would be content
to say that when consciousness exists without kleshas, it is in a
condition that can be called nirvana.

> But the definition only makes sense if we can affirm that the consciousness
> continuum freed from kleshas persists, now as a "pure", "non-dual"
> consciousness continuum.

Just as I do not find the concept of enlightenment at all useful, I do
not find any use for the concept of non-dual. Suffice it to say that
when consciousness is free of greed, hatred and delusion, then it is
also free of pain.

> However, the belief that consciousness remains when kleshas
> are eliminated (that the two are not mutually dependent) is just that-- a
> belief (or metaphysical assumption) that does not follow from the principle of
> dependent origination.

First of all, I would not argue that consciousness NECESSARILY remains
when nirvana is achieved. Indeed, there are canonical stories stating
that some people attained nirvana precisely at the moment when their
consciousness came to an end. So what I would say is that consciousness
MAY continue to exist in the absence of kleshas. It does so when the
conditions that support consciousness continue to arise but the
conditions that support kleshas have ceased.

>  Further, this conviction that the defilements are
> adventitious, that they are not conditions of consciousness and thus can be
> removed while the "pure" "undefiled" consciousness stream persists seems to me
> to amount to much the same thing as saying that consciousness "in itself" or
> "according to its own nature" is pure.

Consciousness in itself is neither pure nor impure. It is just
consciousness. It is said to be pure or impure because of the samskaaras
that attend it. When the attendant samskaaras are kleshas, then
consciousness is said to be impure, but that is understood just to be a
figure of speech that arises from applying a predicate that belongs to
the samskaaras is applied figuratively to consciousness.

> it still appears to me that what is being said here involves metaphysical
> assumptions beyond the doctrine of emptiness.

I still cannot quite see why this would be so. For some reason, I cannot
yet see why everything that one needs to say is not said by speaking
only of dependent origination. Don't get me wrong. I quite love poetry,
and tathaagata-garbha seems a nice enough poetic flourish. But I take
that flourish to be nothing more than an ornament, a bauble that adds
nothing of substance to the doctrine to which it is sometimes appended.
The core doctrine is dependent origination, alias emptiness. Add
whatever embellishments one may like, and nothing significant is added
to dependent orgination.

> So Dharmakiirti tried to save this idiotic doctrine by appealing
> to a deux ex machina in the form of yogi-pratyaksha. According to him, a
> yogin can be aware of all things by direct perception.

This is not quite what Dharmakiirti said. He heaped considerable
ridicule on those poor benighted fools who believed that anyone can know
everything. What good, he asks, is a being who has omniscience? To use
his own rhetorical questions: Who ever needs to know how many maggots
are currently alive in this world? Who is any better off as a result of
believing that somewhere there is a mind that contains a knowledge of
all things.

What we DO need, says Dharmakiirti, is someone who knows everything it
is necessary to know about ridding ourselves of eliminable forms of
frustration (du.hkha). All that is required for that task is a frim grip
on a few universally true principles. But principles are normally
conceptual in nature, and conceptual knowledge, according to
Dharmakiirti is inferior to direct sensation. In fact, Dharmakiirti
asserts that ultimate truth is always sense perception, while conceptual
knowledge deals only with socially mediated conventions. So how can he
say that the only thing really worth knowing, namely, the four noble
truths, are ultimate truths when, as principles, they can only be
conceptual. And this is where Dharmakiirti waves his magic wand and says
that for a yogin the four noble truths are universal principles that can
be directly sensed, not merely induced.

>  So you are saying that just because at present we are limited to certain
> modes of perception that makes it impossible to see all dimensions at once.

I am reporting the views of Dharmakiirti. And it is obvious you were not
paying attention. So let me say it again. As Dharmakiirti, following the
lead of all Buddhists before him, defined sensation, it is impossible to
have direct sensual experience of all things at once. This doctrine
obviously counter to the claims of some (extraordinarily dim-witted)
Buddhists, who believed that a Buddha can be aware of all things at
once. So Dharmakiirti tried to save this idiotic doctrine by appealing
to a deux ex machina in the form of yogi-pratyaksha. According to him, a
yogin can be aware of all things by direct perception.

> Many Mahayana schools believe the very concept of Buddhahood (all
> limitations to omniscience are gone) can do just that. I in theory at least,
> subscribe to that view, simply because all things are fully
> interpenetrating.

Well, you have my condolences. If you'll believe a thing like that,
there is probably very little you would not believe. You probably
believe Iraq was a threat to the security of the USA, too.

> Of all the famour entertainers, Hope was the one whose jokes hung on after
> others' quips had been forgotten.

I always hate to sing off-key during a funeral, but I never forgave Bob
Hope for his political views during the Vietnam era. I had never liked
his style of humor much before then and could never understand why my
father laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks, but after the late
1960s I found Hope's style of humor even less entertaining. But then I
don't much like stand-up comics of any kind, unless they are George
Carlin.

Despite the fact that I can't recall laughing at a Bob Hope joke even
once during a life in which I have managed to find many a thing to smile
and laugh about, I agree with Joanna that this fellow managed to lighten
the heavy hearts of many a sentient being for a few minutes at a time,
and who can complain about that?

> I dont
> think businees per se is the problem- after all its just people sharing
> their talents and productivity with each other.

One of my most embarrassing moments as a teacher was on the first day of
a class on Theravada Buddhism. I was going around the room and asking
people what their backgrounds were. One fellow said he was getting a
masters degree in business administration. I thought (but, thankfully,
did not say) "Are you in the right room? This is a course on Buddhism,
and Buddhism is the antithesis of business." This, of course, was my own
anti-commercial prejudice rearing its ugly head.

As the year went on, the MBA student proved to be one of the best I've
taught and he wrote an excellent paper on right-livelihood businesses.
(His personal favorite was Ben and Jerry's.) He later wrote his MBA
thesis on businesses run on Buddhist principles. Another one of my ugly
prejudices bit the dust. (Now if only I could shake my prejudice against
all the wrong-headed forms of Buddhism that keep popping up.)

> So, did Dharmakiirti believe that enlightenment was a direct cognition
> of the nature of reality or an inferential cogniton?

Dharmakiirti did not talk much about enlightenment. He was more inclined
to talk about du.hkha-nirodha, the cessation of frustration. Like all
kinds of nirodha, this one (also known as nirvaa.na) is an absence. Like
all absences, it could be known only through inference.

Achieving the end of the kleshas, according to Dharmakiirti, requires
seeing into the nature of all phenomena as unsatisfactory, impermanent
and non-self. Any time one is talking about ALL of anything, one can
only be in the realm of induction, because one cannot possibly see all
of anything at once. This posed a bit of a problem for Dharmakiirti, so
he solved the problem by a deus ex machina known as yogi-pratyaksha, a
special kind of direct perception that enables one to know that all
things have the features of a particular phenomenon that one is
presently experiencing. So, for example, if I drop a hammer on my toe, I
experience pain. But if I am a yogi, I can know through that particular
experience that no matter what I do and no matter where I go, I will
feel dissatisfaction.

> I thought all Buddhists believed it was a direct cognition.

It's probably rash to think of anything that ALL Buddhists believe it.
There is as great a range among the beliefs of Buddhists as there is
among the beliefs of any group larger than about one person.

>    However,  one of the thoughts you express is puzzling me since some
> time  ago.  As  far  as I understand Buddhist goal is nirvana, usually
> defined  as  _dukkhanirodha_  (the cessation of dukkha). This is how I
> understand  Buddhism,  but  I  can't  get the point of "the goal of no
> longer  needing  to  have goals".

The Pali texts speak of an arahant as someone who has done what had to
be done. They also speak of an arahant as someone who is no longer in
training. Having attained the state of nirvana, also called the wishless
state, he has nothing more to desire. The absence of desires is, of
course, closely associated with the absence of dukkha, since dukkha
arises only when desires are not fulfilled. When one has not desires at
all, then one has no unfulfilled desires and hence no dukkha.

>  I have come to consider this idea as
> potentially  dangerous  as  TG  view  itself.

Oh yes,it is very dangerous to achieve a desireless state. If everyone
did it, the stock market would crash. If George W. Bush ever hears that
the people of Spain are moving quickly towards the desireless state, he
will probably send the Marines to help your country achieve a regime
change.

>    I  love your humor sense you always make me smile

That's good. I believe we are closest to God when we smile. The Dalai
Lama, on the other hand, has been reported as saying that we are closest
to nirvana when we are sneezing or having an orgasm. So if you're
seeking nirvana, sneeze (or masturbate, or both). If you're seeking God,
grin.

> The realization of emptiness is the perception of an absence. It's like
> working in an office all day long and not noticing the background noise.

Just for the record, Dharmakiirti and his followers claim there is no
such thing as the perception of an absence. Cognition of an absence is a
conceptual construct that arises when one expects to perceive something
and then doesn't perceive it. So the absence of a centipede on my desk
will go entirely unnoticed until I look on my desk and say "I wonder
whether the centipede is still there." It is the failure to see a
centipede that allows me to conclude, via inference, that the centipede
is not there. (Of course, it could be hiding, along with all sorts of
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, somewhere under a pile of papers on
my desk.)

Now the realization of emptiness is just the same. One seeks a
svabhaava, fails to see it and concludes by inference that it is not
present. But in this case, it is not merely a failure to SEE a
svabhaava, but rather the ability to conclude that a svabhaava, defined
in a particular way, is impossible. That is a purely intellectual
exercise and has nothing whatseover do do with perception. So if someone
tells you you can experience emptiness, perceive him to be a fool.

> Or, at least that's my opinion. My experience is that long discussion
> threads are tedious to everyone involved

You can't possibly experience this. You can experience your own sense of
tedium, but you are inferring that others feel the same as you do. And
that inference, it turns out, is quite fallacious.

> By the way thanks for the initial response to my question about the
> Tathatagagarbha/buddha-nature. On less scholarly lists and discussion
> boards the TG doctrine is often equated with God, and is some way what our
> truly true nature is, as if were an atman thingie, and I have frequently
> seen it personified. It, at least in popular Western Dharma land, seems to
> be a feel good thing that has gained very wide currency, but little actual
> study of what it is about.

Do you remember the country singer Dave Dudley? He once sang a song
called "If it feels good, do it." For reasons that I cannot fully
comprehend, that song comes to mind whenever I hear Western Buddhists
discussing the Tathaagata-garbha. In other words, I agree with you that
for many it is little more than a feel-good thing. I think we can all
thank scholars who help us feel bad about it. (The more I hear about it
from scholars who really understand it, the worse I feel.)

> If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that because consciousness
> is empty (dependently originating) any being that possesses consciousness can
> attain enlightenment, given the proper conditions.

Yes, that is exactly my claim. Any being, provided that the conditions
are met, can be rid of kleshas, because the kleshas are conditioned.
Remove the conditions for their appearance in a given consciousness
continuum, and that continuum will still have consciousness but will
lack kleshas. So in principle, any being that is sentient can be free of
kleshas. Therefore, there is no need at all to invoke a doctrine such as
tathaagata-garbha, since that doctrine offers nothing that is not
already provided for in the doctrine of dependent origination (also
known as emptiness).

>> You see, the doctrine of emptiness states nothing but the
>> fact that in the absence of conditions there is no nature at all, and in
>> the presence of conditions, which are always changing, nothing has a
>> fixed nature.
>
> In the above, does nature = svabhaava ?

Yes. After years of translating "svabhaava" differently every time I saw
it, I have hit upon "nature" as the most natural translation. The reason
for this, among others, is that "nature" is derived from the Latin verb
"nasci", which means to be born, and "bhaava" is derived from the verb
"bhavati", which means to come into being. Both Latin "natura" and
Sanskrit "bhaava" signify the characteristics that a thing has from the
time of its coming into being.

When Dharmakiirti speaks of a thing's "svabhaava", he means the thing's
nature, which is determined by the totality of its causes and
conditions. Indeed, he says a thing's nature is nothing but the totality
of its causes and conditions, so it's not that conditions cause a
thing's nature, but rather that conditions ARE a thing's nature. So
Dharmakiirti can say that the nature of every conditioned thing is to
be, well, conditioned (empty), and that this fact also entails that no
thing has any nature independent of its causes and conditions, so every
conditioned thing is empty of an independent nature. This, I think, is
quite an advance over the muddle that Naagaarjuna created by declaring
that things have no svabhaava.

> The doctrine of emptiness/dependent origination does not
> provide any such theoretical basis or justification for this claim; one cannot
> infer from the fact that all the factors and conditions that comprise a human
> being lack self-existence and therefore can change that any human being can be
> transformed into an enlightened being.

I don't think this is true at all. If (as Naagaarjuna and I claim)
emptiness is but another word for dependent origination, then there is
plenty of provision for the notion that anyone can, if the conditions
are right, stop having kleshas and thereby enter into nirvana (which is
just another name for the absence of kleshas).

>  If one could infer the potential for
> Buddhahood simply from the fact of emptiness we would have to conclude that
> "even grasses and trees" (and coffee cups?) can attain Buddhahood,

Not quite so. You see, the doctrine of emptiness states nothing but the
fact that in the absence of conditions there is no nature at all, and in
the presence of conditions, which are always changing, nothing has a
fixed nature. This means that only those things that have the necessary
conditions can attain enlightenment. One of those necessary conditions
is consciousness, which grass and trees are said to lack. (Coffee cups?
Well, that's more controversial. My coffee cup plays a key role in
helping me become an awakened being every morning.)

> Here's what I have in mind.  I don't have to be a Chrsitian to
> believe that there are many great stories in the Bible, and I
> don't have to take them as literal historical claims to understand
> that they do communicate information which is important and true.
> That is the function of symbol.

Okay. What you are describing is what I would probably have called a
myth. So now we seem to agree that the tathaagata-garbha doctrine is
a myth, rather than a literal description of reality. Now my claim
has been that as a myth it fails to communicate anything important
that is not already communicated just as well by standard Buddhist
doctrines. As a myth, it fails to do any of the useful work tht one
usually expects of myths. To make matters worse, it does do some
rather unfortunate work, namely, that of getting people confused and
prolonging their delusions and attachments.

> In a religious context, symbols often embody information more
> clearly than literal information.

Well, I'm not sure how anyone would either verify or falsify that
claim. Anything that is said in any way at all is symbolic, because
all language consists of symbols. So I suspect it is not a contrast
between literal and symbolic that you intend to make but rather a
constrast between literal and figurative. I would be inclined to
agree that figurative language sometimes conveys information in a
more aesthetically pleasing and engaging way than does literal
narrative, but more clearly? I doubt that very much, because
figures are usually more polysemous that language that is meant to
be taken literally. So if one wishes to offer a reader a greater
degree of latitude in interpreting what one has written, then
figurative language is a good way to do that.

Now if all you are saying is that tathaagata-garbha is a poetic turn
of phrase that embodies a metaphoric way of talking about one's
potential to be as awake as a buddha, who would argue with that? A
garbha is an embryo. So to speak of one's future awakening as an
embryonic buddha waiting to hatch is rather charming, I suppose. But
is it any more CLEAR to say "You are an embryonic buddha" than to
say "If you play your cards right, you'll wake up some day"? I don't
think so.

> The problem is if one takes symbolic information as literal.

Well, yes. That does create a rather large problem. Moreover, it is
a problem tht seems to have plagued much of Buddhism, because it
seems to me that there were quite a few Buddhists who did take
tathaagata-garbha as literal and advanced it as a philosophical
doctrine that could be supported by various kinds of argumentation.
If your contention is that those people (let's begin with Asanga)
undermined Buddhism, then we are in complete agreement. I'm sure you
will join me in lighting the match that burns their books.

> If your criterion for making distinctions between phenomena of
> religious experience is the specific details of the presentation,
> then you operate on the level of philosophy.  If you are
> interested in the phenomenon of gnosis itself, then you operate in
> the field of religious psychology.

I agree that philosophical analysis is a different kettle of fish
from something like Jungian analysis. I personally have done quite a
bit of both in my day. What I have been trying to suggest is that
the tathaagata-garbha level is a philosophical disaster of almost
unparallelled dimensions, and as a psychological archetype (a
complex in the collective unconscious perhaps) it is, from the
perspective of the goals of Buddhist practice, a most unfortunate
neurosis.

>    This thread is being very interesting to me since I have been a
> tathagatagarbha holder for several years.  Now I'm moving toward a
> skeptical and pragmatic way of understanding the path, and this
> move is making me to rethink all my buddhist ideas and this is
> having very deep consequences.

Something that you could try is being a skeptical and pragmatic
tathagatagarbha holder. You could, for example, subscribe to the
view that the tathagata-garbha is your true and enduring self and
that its permanent nature is skeptical and pragmatic. You could even
says its principal function is to doubt its own existence.

> As a Chan Buddhist teacher now I'm teaching Chan in a non
> tathagatagarbha vein and it is being very interesting and
> demanding.

Despite my personal misgivings about tathagata-garbha, I know of
many people (including my lovely wife) who finds it a very useful
doctrine.  So what I would recommend to a teacher is to teach the
doctrine to those who find it useful, but let it be known that there
is no doctrine anywhere that a person MUST hold in order to make
progress towards the goal of no longer needing to have goals.

> I also find that tathagatagarbha view offers some risky gates, for
> example, it is not difficult to fall in an aimless life, laziness
> and unethical behaviour.

Yes, that is a very real danger. Perhaps what is needed is to keep
watching the mind very carefully, and whenever one sees complacency
and lethargy coming in through the tathagata-garbha gate, then one
should close that portal for a while.

>    A curiosity, since I'm becoming skeptical and pragmatic I'm
> recovering my taste for traditions and I feel a deep interest in a
> religion where G-d plays an important role. How odd are we humans!

I have experienced a similar trajectory. It used to be that the very
mention of the word God (or Dieu or Dios or Gott or even Elvis
Presley) made me break out into a rash, and then I was sure to say
something very rude. Nowadays I have developed a taste for all
manner of rituals and trappings that would make my Protestant
ancestors spin in their graves, and I can hear people talk about
Dios y santos y milagros without even breaking into a sweat (so long
as they don't talk about such things in English with a Texan
accent). Indeed, I find I enjoy the company of people who are
saturated with the sweet honey of divinity rather than steeped in
the sauerkraut of atheism. (But don't hold your breath waiting for
me to become a Republican.)

Tastes, like everything else, change. Despite the gradual changes in
taste, my skepticism seems to be as robust as ever (although I doubt
it does me or anyone else any good), and never have I felt more
pragmatic (even though I can see no practical use in being so).

> A nuanced reading of religious literature takes some content as
> literally descriptive and some as expressions of the psychological
> truths.

Now wait a minute. I am disinclined to accept this false dichotomy
(especially from a non-dualist). Surely there are literally
descriptive psychological truths. And the Buddha himself is alleged
to have said that one should rely on literal doctrine (niitaartha)
more than on doctrine that needs to be unpacked (neyaartha). So
would it not be more in keeping with the Old Man's advice to look
into those doctrines that literally express psychological truths
rather than to delve into those doctrines that express psychological
realities indirectly, poetically, symbolically and ambiguously?

> The emprical justification for this is the structural invariance
> of human descriptions of the universal ground.

The fact that one can find people all over the world who more
or less agree on a nebulous idea (such as that of universal ground)
does not make the doctrine true. As I recall, the Buddha himself
suggested that the vast majority of people are seriously mistaken
about some of the most important things of life. He recommended,
therefore, to set structural invariance aside and go for the truth
of the matter. And according to him one of the truths to go for is
that there is no universal ground.

>> Tathagata-garbha, like anything else, will go away if you will
>> let go of it. The psychological truth it dresses up will survive
>> in more modest garb.
>
> This simply fails on an empirical level.  The fact is, it has NOT
> gone away after 2500 years of Buddhism.

Your numbers are a little off. I am not aware of any references to
this doctrine in any literature that can be dated earlier than
around the 5th century of the Christian era. So we are looking at a
doctrine that has been advocated by some Buddhists for at most 1500
years. And, as Jamie and I have both pointed out, the doctrine has
been very firmly rejected and trenchantly criticized by some
Buddhists since its introduction. So the fact that it has not gone
away for 1500 years is hardly a recommendation for accepting it,
any more than it is a recommendation of rape that it has not gone
away for approximately 50,000 years.

> You can either attribute this to the philosophical naivetee of
> many millions of Buddhists (which is certainly a possible
> position), or you can continue to dig, asking what this fact in
> itself might mean.

Another false dichotomy, I'm afraid. What I would advocate is
digging deeply into the fact of why some Buddhists have persisted in
advocating this doctrine and carefully considering the hypothesis
that the survival of tathaagata-garbha doctrine has survived because
of the persistent failure of many Buddhists to think carefully. One
possible reason for this failure to think carefully is the one
already suggested by Jamie, namely, that a lot of people panic in
the face of their their own mortality and yearn for something that
is immortal. I would add that some people tire of uncertainty and
become disheartened at the prospect of a task that is never
completed, and their weariness predisposes them to indulge in
fantasies of certainty and perfection. And so we have such ideas as
God, Brahman, Aatman, and the Golden Lustre. What all of these
doctrines have in common is that the Buddha called them all
laughable. Your assignment is to show us either why the Buddha was
wrong is dismissing those ideas as laughable, or to show us why
Tathaagata-garbha is not laughable for the same reasons they are
laughable.

> Richard, be kind enough to address the psychological truth it
> dresses up.

As I understand it from what I have read of Asanga, the principal
motivation for subscribing to the tathaagata-garbha doctrine was to
avert the depression and despair that might set in if one were too
familiar with the truth of how things are. Specifically, the TG
theory is prescribed as an antidote to the doldrums that might visit
a bodhisattva upon his or her encounter with emptiness. So you might
call Tathaagata-garbha a kind of doctrinal Prozac for bodhisattvas
whose bodhicitta has temporarily been snuffed out by s'uunyataa.

What I would suggest is that a better antidote to depression and
despair would be to understand emptiness correctly in the first
place and not to see it as a bleak doctrine. The best way to do
this, I submit, is to realize that emptiness is merely a poetic way
of talking about dependent origination. Dependent origination, I
think, is just about the best news in town, because from that
doctrine it follows that bitter experiences can always be brought to
an end by changing conditions, among them being our own inner
attitudes, some of which are more or less under our control.  The
conditioned nature of things, which means that nothing has a fixed
nature (or that everything is empty of a fixed nature), ensures that
changes for the better are always possible. (Of course, so are
changes for the worse, which is why the work of maintaining a
healthy mind is never done.)

The doctrine adds nothing more to the good news of dependent
origination and emptiness. What it does add is a rather confused and
muddled metaphysical doctrine according to which the mind DOES have
a permanent and fixed nature, and that that nature is one of
permanent bliss. From a phenomenological perspective, of course, it
has to be admitted that people still get the blues. (Even
bodhisattvas get the blues. Just think of the time Avalokiteshvara
exploded into a billion pieces when he contemplated the enormity of
the task of rescuing every sentient being from samsara.) So this
means that TG-vaadins have to concoct some account for why a
permanently blissful mind sometimes feels cranky and out of sorts
when, for example, the body it is associated with is having a bad
hair day. The answer is that the TG is somehow being obscured by
afflictions. Well, this is a psychological truth that is accounted
for perfectly well in the much more simple and straightforward
teaching of dependent origination.

So in sum, nothing positive is gained by adding the
tathaagata-garbha doctrine to one's theoretical framework. What IS
gained is a whole new set of thorny and distracting philosophical
doctrines, which are not too different from the negative
side-effects of the various drugs that people take to battle
depression and despair. So probably the best policy, for those who
have the willpower to do it, is just say NO to tathaagata-garbha.

> Tathagathagharba, a doctrine which won't go away, can be analyzed
> as a psychological truth, even if it is objectionable as a
> philosophical truth.

Tathagata-garbha, like anything else, will go away if you will let
go of it. The psychological truth it dresses up will survive in more
modest garb.

> It is the question between taking the doctrine as an opportunity
> for studying and learning, or not.

Anything worth learning can be approached in a variety of ways. So
one who rejects tathaagata-garbha is hardly opting against studying
and learning. Rather, a garbha-discarder may choose other ways of
studying and learning and growing and becoming refined than does the
garbha-collector. Sobre gustas no hay nada escrito.

> It's unclear to me whether the life-faculty and associated life-span of
> say a plant is the result of karma generated by that continuum (as
> is say the experience of suffering), or not.

According to the Buddhist tradition I was reporting, a plant has no
consciousness continuum. It also has no karma. So its life span
cannot be determined by itw own karma. That raises the question:
whose karma, then, does determine its life span? There are two
possible answers. One answer might be that there are some things
(rocks, trees and possibly some types of micro-organism) that exist
but are in no way within the realm of karma and karmic ripening
(karma-vipaaka). (I personally like this view very much, but I know
of no one who was wise enough to argue for it.) Another answer might
be that since rocks and trees are objects of sense, and since all
objects of sense are considered to be karma-vipaaka, then even rocks
and trees are determined by someone's karma. This latter answer was
advanced by Vasubandhu et al. But since a rock or a tree have no
karma of their own, the karma that determines their existence must
be the karma of sentient beings. This is exactly what Vasubandhu
argues in chapters three and four of the Abhidharmakosha, namely,
that the world of insentient objects comes about as the ripening of
the collected karma of ALL sentient beings in the universe. So the
lifespan of the cottonwood tree in my back yard is determined by the
karma of you and me and Jim Peavler and the billion or so ants in my
back yard and all the lice in George W. Bush's hair and the fleas on
Bill Clinton's cat and so forth. (Please forgive me for not naming
ALL the sentient beings whose karma helped make the cottonwood
tree's life possible.)

As for Asanga's views on these matters, I am afraid I am ignorant
of his system of abhidharma. All I know is that just about every
Buddhist who wrote a treatise on abhidharma had a different take on
these issues. Everybody's system makes pretty good sense, but
nobody's system made perfect sense. I suspect the reason for that is
that reality is a hell of a lot more complex than any human mind is
capable of grasping.

> But are absence and emptiness (sunyata, svabhava) the same?

I think not. Emptiness is just a poetic name for dependent
origination. Absence is an entirely different concept. If you have
your Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy at hand, take a look at
the entry "Negative facts in classical Indian philosophy" by Brendan
S. Gillon. There you will find some interesting background on how
various Indian thinkers dealt with the puzzles surrounding the issue
of how it is that one can know that something is absent, an issue
that eventually involves people in making decisions as to the
metaphysical implications of absence. It turns out to be a much more
complex problem than one might first think, which might account for
why there was so much ado about nothing.

Years ago I saw a comic strip in a newspaper in which some
character was saying to another: "A PhD is where you learn more and
more about less and less until eventually you know everything about
nothing." I often wondered whether the work on absences by my friend
and colleague Brendan Gillon was the inspiration for that cartoon.

> You seem to be suggesting either that insensate plants have
> produced karma to account for their lifespan, or that they are not
> alive.

This is not my position; I am merely reporting it. The position I am
reporting was held by all Indian Buddhists that I am aware of; I am
not, however, aware of all Indian Buddhist traditions, so others may
have held other views. But the Indian Buddhist view of which I am
aware holds that plants are alive but insentient. They have no sense
organs and thus are not conscious and have no feelings. (That's
why one can eat them without violating the precept against
harming sentient beings.) But plants are alive, because one can tell
a dead plant for a living one. So one can be alive without being
sentient. In fact, for Dharmakiirti and later Buddhist logicians,
the premiss that whatever is alive must be sentient is used as an
example of a faulty major premiss.

This whole issue became one of heated debate between Buddhists and
Jains. The latter claimed that plants DO have a sense-faculty. They
have just one, namely, the faculty of touch, and they therefore have
an ability to feel pain inflicted to their bodies. That is why for
Jains even eating vegetable matter is a violation of the precept
against harming sentient beings. That's why a Jain monk attains
liberation only after refusing all food and dying of starvation. The
Buddhists found the Jain position extreme; the Jains found the
Buddhist position a wimpy rationalization for wanton cruelty to
vegetation.

> The monk was not stupid for fouling up the lawn mower engine.

This story brings back a flood of memories of the many times I have
been in a new environment and have not known how to do something
that any child in that environment would know how to do. Not long
ago I read an interesting book advancing the hypothesis that one of
the features of the human being is that this animal has almost no
innate, instinctual knowledge about its environment. While other
animals are "hard-wired" to seek certain kinds of food and habitat
and will get sick or die if they cannot find what they seek, human
beings have little hard-wired knowledge. Instead they have a
remarkable ability to learn from observation. This feature is what
makes it possible for human beings to adapt eventually to almost any
environment; it is also what makes it necessary for a child to spend
so long under the care of parents before embarking out into the
world as an independent critter. It is also a big factor in what
makes us social animals even when we become adults. We are built to
rely heavily on learning from others.

Hal's monk (an Asian, I presume) who did not know not to put Diesel
fuel into a gasoline-powered lawnmower might seem incredibly stupid
to a six-year-old child brought up in a mechanically sophisticated
environment. To the Asian monk, on the other hand, an adult American
who has to be told how to tell the difference between a statue of
Amida and a statue of Shakyamuni must also seem incredibly stupid,
even a bit retarded.

Among my earliest childhood memories is that of a small brass
Buddhist monk that used to stand on the mantel in my childhood home.
During my entire childhood, my parents said this monk was a Tibetan
lama and that the machine in his hand was a prayer wheel.
Eventually, when I got into Buddhist studies and Buddhist practice,
it became obvious to me that the "lama" was in fact a Chinese monk
in Chinese robes and that the machine in his hand is a wooden fish.
It is so obviously not Tibetan in any way that I can scarcely
believe how ignorant my parents were. Their ignorance now seems so
profound to me that I have had to re-examine everything they taught
me about everything. (I still have the small brass statue, which I
keep as a reminder of how stupid Americans are about Asian
cultures.)

Hal's story, and my own experience with the bronze "lama", reminds
me of Carl Jung's conviction that people who try as adults to adopt
a religion that they did not know from early childhood rarely
succeed in gaining more than very superficial benefits from the
religion to which they convert. They do not know how to interpret
the symbols, and they do not have a very rich storehouse of stories
to draw upon, and they understand almost everything through the mind
of their childhood values. So it would be better, he argued, for a
person to move on to ever more refined versions of his or her
childhood religion than to adopt an alien religion as an adult. The
Dalai Lama has often made precisely the same point (perhaps because
he has had a lot of experience with earnest Western "Buddhists" who
could not tell a Vajrayogini from a Durga or a tulku from a geshe).

Even before Jung came along, Swami Vivekananda was telling Americans
at the Parliament of Religions back in 1893 that if Christian
missionaries REALLY wanted to help Indians, they would help them be
better Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims rather than converting them to
Christianity. When Vivekananda eventually established a mission in
the West, his stated objective was to help Christians be better
Christians and Jews be better Jews. Despite that, one can go to
Vedanta Society temples in various parts of America and see
non-Asian people sitting on the floor, chanting in Sanskrit and
offering ghee imported Indian incense to Shivaratri or Kali, and
studying Shankara and Patanjali. How, one wonders, is that making
them better Christians and Jews? Or is this another example of the
old Indian saying that every guru is murdered by his own disciples?

>> Show me any institution (from a health club to a country to a major
>> religion) that has no dogmas and no rituals, and I'll show you an
>> institution that will not survive much more than a few months.
>
> Why? Is this something that you've discovered to be fact, or an observation
> borne of experience? I am not challenging you - I am curious.

Pretty much all of my experience during the past fifty-eight years
has supported the view that dogma and ritual is the glue that holds
societies together. I got a head start in seeing this, because I
grew up in America, which has always been, in my experience, a
particularly ritual-driven society. That used to fill me with a
profound disgust about America, but years of trying to experience
some sort of community without rituals and with a minimum of dogmas
led me to appreciate how important dogmas and ritual are for making
communities coherent. Shun them, and you end up being a very lone
ranger.

> It appears by your tone (within this awfully passive medium) that
> you feel I have been indelicate in some way and have rubbed you up
> the wrong way, so to speak.

There is no real tone in an e-mail message. All tone is imagined. So
your supposition that you may have rubbed me the wrong way is
probably just wishful thinking on your part. Here on BUDDHA-L 
I think you'll find that discussions are almost never ill-natured, and
anyone getting seriously rubbed the wrong way is very rare. I think
the last time it happened was back in September 2001, but lots of
people were feeling pretty touchy in those days.

> This I will do. My knowledge is minute and I have a desire to learn, but
> that seems to require either the absorption of texts and/or attending a
> centre. It's this latter point that fuelled my original email.

Take heart. I studied Buddhism completely on my own for fifteen
years before venturing into a center. When I first went to a
Buddhist center I was so horrified by what I saw that I stayed away
another five years or so. Then I plunged headlong into belonging to
a center and got that out of my system. Now I find that if I am
within 1000 miles of a Buddhist center, that is close enough. As I
say, if you shun rituals and dogmas hard enough, even Tonto won't
want to hand around you for long.

Of course, as a Lone Ranger without a Tonto you find yourself
getting completely trapped in your own personal rituals and dogmas.
These are arguably a few thousand times more damaging to you than
the glue that holds communities together, because one's own dogmas
and rituals are sort of like fleas and ticks; it's hard to get rid
of them unless you belong to a tribe of folks who will kindly pick
them off the hard-to-reach places. And it's hard to belong to a
tribe without adopting their dogmas and rituals. So maybe its better
to forget being dogma- and ritual-free, and just go for some tribe
made up of people whose demeanor you can stomach. Or find a good
lover.

> Part of what appeals to me in Buddhism is the concept of an
> Agnostic Buddhist - free of dogma, ritual and other trappings.

Good luck finding some form of Buddhism that is free of dogma,
ritual and other trappings. Show me any institution (from a health
club to a country to a major religion) that has no dogmas and no
rituals, and I'll show you an institution that will not survive much
more than a few months.

If it weren't for all its dogmas and trappings, there wouldn't be
any Buddhism around for any of us to inquire into. So be grateful
for them. And then just ignore the ones that don't appeal to you
personally just now.

> It seems to me that a "what works for YOU" approach is more
> important than mental or physical conformity to any past ideal.

True enough. On the other hand, one of the best ways to discover
what works for you is to listen respectfully when others tell you
what has worked for them. Listen and then, if you feel a need,
modify to taste.

>        If an animal is writhing in pain, or if, for example, a dog
> whimpers or howls, how could that not be seen as indicating
> suffering?

I quite agree. To this sort of thing I would add the observation
that dogs and cats I have known show signs of worry and anxiety when
they see, for example, suitcases being packed. I take this to mean
that they infer that they are soon going to be left behind, perhaps
even taken to a kennel or some other hell realm, and feel dread at
the prospect thereof. I think it's just plain silly to think that
animals experience no dukkha. While I admit that my supposition that
animals experience dukkha is only an inference, based on a certain
amount of projection of my own feelings onto others, I would quickly
point out that my supposition that other human beings think, reason
and feel dukkha is also only an inference.

>        One more thing, directed to Richard and others who question
> trans-lifetime rebirth: It occurs to me that without rebirth,
> entering the stream is ruled out for animals (who haven't the
> mentality to follow the path in any respect), and thus disbelief
> in rebirth also implies disbelief in other Buddhist principles,
> including at least the one to the effect that liberation is a
> potential for all sentient beings.

Yes. What's the problem, exactly, with that?

> (Of course, one is free to choose whichever Buddhist teachings one
> finds believable. I'm just pointing out that disbelief in rebirth
> carries with it some consequences with regard to other issues.)

To be sure. As I see it this morning (before my meditation and first
cup of coffee and before I have put new sugar water in the
hummingbird feeder despite the fact that a hummingbird is peeking in
the window at me and licking its beak), the only Buddhist teaching
worth paying attention to is the observation that there is nowhere
in the universe where a being with expectations can be permanently
free of disappointment. How one reacts to this potentially bad news
is such a personal matter that it would be presumptuous for anyone
to stipulate it for others. (It has been my experience that the vast
majority of Buddhists don't seem to mind being presumptuous, even to
the point of obnoxion, on this issue.)

My own preference, worth nothing to anyone but my"self", is to give
serious thought to how much disappointment I am willing to endure
and inflict on others as a matural consequence of the expectations
(and hopes and dreams and pleasures and so forth) that I am, for the
time being, unwilling to abandon. The results of thinking about this
change from time to time, but I am never sure whether the changes
are for the better or for the worse, nor am I sure how one would go
about deciding what is better and what is worse.

> Thus is how ye shall see all this fleeting world: A star at dawn,
> a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a
> flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream. (From the Diamond Sutra)

As fas as I can tell, I was born seeing the world pretty much like
that. It is not obvious to me why seeing the world that way is in
any way preferable to seeing the world as a star that is always
shining whether one sees it or not, a sky that is so open that it
receives clouds without complaint, the element fire that can pop up
at any time when the conditions are right, a delightful opera in
which phantoms sometimes appear, and an continuity of experiences of
unpredictable duration in which dreams are every bit as important as
waking experiences and in which death is every bit as important as
life and for all of which it is very difficult not to be moved to
tears with gratitude.

Now I must go feed that hummingbird.

>   On the bright side the Brahma Net sutra allows the precepts to be
> administered to eunuchs and others excluded in the vinaya. A much
> more democratic view.

You have to go only as far as the Pali canon to find texts in which
precepts are considered applicable to all human beings, including
those who are not eligible to serve as monks. It may help to remember
that the purpose of being a monk is not just to attain nirvana (since
anyone can do that) but to be inspiring to others by being perceived
to be living a perfectly simple life and enjoying the fruits thereof.

The perfectly simple life is a life of living on alms. And living on
alms means being dependent on mainstream society. The price that one
pays for being dependent is that one must appear to conform to the
values of mainstream culture. And if one's mainstream culture has a
phobia about homosexuality, disfigurement and deformity, then the
begging community (if it is to maintain the respect of "polite"
society) must exclude the people excluded from polite society. This
is why a begging community (bhikkhu-sangha) is rarely the vehicle
for radical social reform.

If it's radical reform you want, you need to go for refuge not to
the begging community (bhikkhu-sangha) but to the community of truly
worthy individuals (ariya-sangha), which is an entirely different
kettle of fish. Whether there are any Buddhists in the ariya-sangha
I do not know for sure.

> Interesting--that being the case, how can he continue to practise as a
> rabbi? Are they allowed to be atheists?

Swami Vivekananda once observed that atheists are usually at least
as preoccupied with God as most theists are, adding that having God
always on one's mind, even if to deny his existence, cannot lead to
much harm and may well lead to some good. As for agnostics, if their
agnosticism stems from a genuine inquiry and failure to come up with
adequate evidence to support any position, they have a truly
philosophical temperament, said the good swami, and should therefore
be regarded as among the finest people in the world.

It's the true believers, the ones who never doubt and never question
their own convictions, that are the greatest threat to religion and
to society as a whole.  (Now why do you suppose George W. Bush and
John Ashcroft just came to mind?)

As for being an agnostic rabbi, I was once told by a rabbi that God
gave human beings the ability to reason so that they would doubt His
existence. Not to use the gift of reason for the reason for which it
was designed would be to insult the creator. (On the other hand,
when I repeated this saying to another rabbi, the second rabbi just
pursed his lips and shook his head, which I took to be an indication
of some degree of disagreement.)

>In the experience of enightenment, what is actually enlightened - is it
>consciousness?  Is there a pre-existing state of consciousness that is
>"already enlightened" and somehow forgotten?

The answer you'll get to this depends entirely on whom you ask. There is
no single answer to this question in the history of Buddhism. One answer
is that the citta-samtaana (the continuum of causally related moments of
awareness) contains various pain-causing characteristics (dharmas) until
"enlightenment" occurs, and after that, this continuum contains only
positive and joy-producing characteristics. According to this view, a
continuum (samtaana) is a fiction, it being nothing but a convenient
name for a set of individual transitory dharmas. So what is
"enlightened" is this fictitious non-entity. So that is one view. 

A second view is that consciousness is intrinsically joyous and luminous
and awakened, but this aboriginal nature of the citta (mind) is obscured
by essentially unreal impurities, just as the sun is obscured by clouds.
You'll hear quite a bit of this sort of talk in Zen circles. One
particularly well-articulated account of this position can be found in
Robert Buswell's _The Korean Approach to Zen_, which has several
translations of works by Chinul, along with an excellent introduction
and comments by Buswell. 

Chinul, by the way, is an interesting character in the history of Zen.
He never studied with a Zen master, yet he came to be acknowledged as an
enlightened teacher and is considered the founder of Korean Zen. In
Korean Zen one does not usually have a single Zen master but works under
many of them, usually for no longer than three months at a time. The
rationale behind this system is that every teacher has idiosyncrasies,
and one of the best ways for a disciple not to be too strongly imprinted
by the quirks of a particular teacher is to train with a variety of
teachers. Then all the quirks get evened out; at least the disciple has
a choice of which quirks to adopt as his own. 

>I sit here consciously tapping keys.  What is it that's conscious, and
>what is consciousness?
>
>Would it make any difference if I knew the answer to this?

None whatsoever. It's the biggest non-issue in Buddhism, concocted no
doubt by scholar-monks with far too much time on their hands and too
little to do but to propagate useless prapanca. (I can't complain; if it
weren't for them, I would not have a job.) 

>>Bancroft: There is really no such thing as an `enlightened' individual.
>
> E.g., someone for whom the above statement is not somehow
> "self-evident" could rightly ask: how could this possible be
> verified, particularly by someone who by inference from his own
> stated position is not englightened ?

I don't think any claim can be verified by any means whatsoever.
Hypotheses can be falsified. The way to falsify the Bancroft
hypothesis would be to produce a counterexample. That is, if you
could produce someone who is an enlightened individual, then his
hypothesis would be proven false. Of course producing such an
individual would require establishing some criteria of exactly what
enlightenment is and then showing that the individual in question
had just those criteria. What I think may be behind Bancroft's claim
is that such criteria are themselves untestable. I mean, how would
one test the claim that an individual had permanently eradicated all
kleshas and was therefore no longer capable of experiencing any from
of dukkha arising from greed, hatred or delusion?

> Also, perhaps the idea in some Mahaayaana teachings that the
> Buddha is omniscient is just a formal way of getting at
> the same idea, that awakening is an endless process.

Yes, if the standard is set impossibly high, and one knows that it
is impossibly high and that no one therefore ever has or ever will
attin it, then one has arrived exactly at Bancroft's position. If
this is what Mahayana teaches, then it is in conformity with
Bancroft's hypothesis.

> For all that you know and I beleave that is a lot, you still are
> just a sentient being and not a buddha or an enlightened being.

How do you know this? My belief is that everybody is enlightened
sometimes. That is, we all have enlightened moments. I suppose that
is even true of myself.

> Why should we beleave what you say over the Buddha.

Why should you believe what the Buddha reportedly said over what I
say? After all, we have no evidence that he really was awakened.
Sure, he claimed that he was, but so do lots of people. So what is a
person to do: believe everyone who says he or she is enlightened?
How would that differ from believing that every product that is
advertised on television is most worthy of buying?

> Buddha told us to look into what he said for our selves, and that
> is what we should be tring to do.

I could not agree more.

> You are a good man

Thank you, but with all due respect, I would also have to ask you
how you know this. What I would claim is that sometimes I have
enlightened moments and sometimes I am not a good man at all. I
would guess the same is true of you.

> I think some were that a lot of western buddhist teachers like
> yourself have become jaded to the idea of enlightenment

The way I see it, anyone who desires what cannot be attained is
bound to experience dukkha. (The Buddha said that, and my experience
has confirmed it.) What this means is that if someone strives to
attain enelightenment but enlightenment is not possible, then one
will feel dukkha. So it may well be that one of the best ways to
eliminate unnecessary dukkha is to cultivate a strongly realistic
sense of what it is possible for oneself to achieve.

> I ask you the same thing, why should we not beleave in
> freedom from samsara.

I never suggested that there is no freedom from samsara. On the
contrary, I think we all break free from time to time. But does it
follow from the fact that one can do something sometimes that one
can do it all the time? (For example, I can jump off the ground, but
I can't stay up in the sky for very long. I can stay out of samsara
for much longer than I can stay in the air. But I keep coming back.)

> Utaratantra makes me think of you because I do not see how your
> practice will be any good with what you have show to be an
> understanding that you have gained.

Before you can pass any judgement at all on how good my practice is,
you should try to spend a few months observing me very closely in my
daily life. (Even the Buddha said he could not tell how effective
another person's practice is without looking at them for quite a
long time.) Without such observation, you have no basis at all to
base any judgement on. And judgement without a basis has a special
name in English: prejudice.

> Also do you beleave in Tathagatagabhra?

I neither believe it nor deny it. It's an interesting idea that some
people find very helpful. I myself have not yet found a need for it
in my own practice. Moreover, I do not believe it makes a lot of
difference what a person believes.

> Surely, it's our mind's holding on that characterises kleshas? What's in
> the body has been deposited by previous physical and mental acts.

That's the official Buddhist dogma. I am not at all convinced it is
true. Nor am I convinced that it does much good to pretend that it
is true.

> If one holds the kleshas to be 'rooted' in the body, then it's a natural
> conclusion that it is not possible to eliminate them unless one 
> expires.

Yes, exactly. That is the view held by quite a few schools of Indian
philosophy, such as the Nyaaya-vais'e.sika and some schools of
Vednaata. That is why I said I may be more of a Naiyaayika than a
Buddhist on this particular issue.

> In this sense, a 'giving up' would reduce dukkha. But I would suggest it
> is a temporary measure that reaches its limit in this lifetime. On one's
> death bed, one may regret that.

If the reget is only on one's death bed, it will be a short-lived
regret. I can live with that.

> Beliefs in the possible or impossible do not cause frustration.

Believing that something is possible when it is not, and then acting
on that belief by striving for the impossible, certainly does cause
frustration. Indeed, not getting what one wants is one of the
Buddha's definitions of frustration (dukkha).

> Where a Naiyaaikan perspective may be useful is that it may help
> one to accept the possibility of complete extinction just to see
> what arises in the mind, as an aid to letting-go. To hold it as a
> view would be unwise.

I need to be convinced of that.

> Again, your conclusion will follow if you equate the genetic disposition
> with kleshas. It's good that your kleshas have reduced, for that reduces
> dukkha.  However, I don't know what it would mean to reduce your genetic
> predisposition.

That's precisely my point. I don't believe one ever does reduce
one's genetic predispostion. What one does, at best, is to learn to
live with one's genetic predisposition. For example, even if one has
a genetic predisposition to be angry, one can learn to manage it and
work around it so that one does not act on it quite as often as one
might if one did not work on learning to cope with it. But that is a
far cry from eradicating the anger-reflex irrevocably. It is the
latter that Buddhism promises. And I believe it is a false promise,
one that if believed will result only in disappointment (dukkha).

> Through a continued experience of not finding limits - or of
> finding and surmounting - I tend to negate definite limits.

Your experiences are evidently much different from mine. I have
never experienced "not finding a limit". On the contrary, I
constantly find them. My own genetic predisposition (a fortunate
one, I feel) is to accept them.

> It's my experience that limits once thought to be definite can
> prove to be impermanent, given time.

Again, our experiences differ considerably. But no matter. I am
deeply content with mine, and I trust you are equally content with
yours.

"Just as gold is tested in the fire, so test my words in the fire of 
spiritual experience."

begin{quote}
 Those great teachers who are wholly convinced of the obvious 
 rationality of their own teachings and of their own ability to explain lose
 all fear. And they dare give voice to the lion's roar that silences bad 
 philosophy, which is akin to the craziness of rutting elephants. They dare 
 to say: "Clever people, o monks, should accept what I say after putting 
 it to the test, just as they accept gold after testing it by melting 
 it, scratching it and scraping it on a whetstone. They should not believe 
 what I say out of deference to me."
end{quote}

> Some people may not need to believe in cessation, but it's another
> thing to believe that it's impossible.

It's not un unreasonable belief. Many Indian religious schools held
it. No Buddhists did, of course. The principal argument against the
view that total cessation of the kleshas is possible is that many of
the kleshas seem to be rooted in the physical body as survival
mechanisms. So as long as one has a physical body, one will be prone
to them. Although this is not a Buddhist view, I find it a better
candidate for the truth than the canonical Buddhist position. I also
find it a position that reduces dukkha in that it eliminates the
frustration that might come from trying the impossible. In this
respect, I suppose I would have to confess to being more of a
Jungian (or a Naiyaayika) than a Buddhist.

> I would suppose that your kleshas have been reduced over the
> years, so the 'limitations of nature' would appear to be an
> unknown so far.

Yes, but one of the limitations of nature is that I have a physical
body that is the product of inummerable generations of sentient
beings who have been capable of surviving owing to their lust, their
willingness to be violent, their terrioriality, their jealousy and
so forth. I reckon genetic predisposition is a very powerful force
and cannot be eliminated by a combination of Buddhist meditation
and wishful thinking.

> I would further suppose you wish to continue to reduce them.

If possible. If I reach my limit (as I have done in every other
enterprise I have ever undertaken), I'll accept it gracefully.

> I feel mind can be developed indefinitely.

This has not been my experience. I have experienced the ceiling
principle (the principle that there is an upper limit beyond which
one cannot go no matter how much effort is expended) in everything I
have ever tried to do. I cannot see offhand why striving to
eliminate kleshas would be any different.

> If we hold on to a limited view of what is and what isn't
> possible, then that which appears impossible will forever remain
> so - at least for us.

I am quite willing to live within the limitations that have been
imposed on me by nature. I do not need to believe that it is
possible to be completely free of all kleshas in order to work on
being less influenced by kleshas than I now am. For me the goal of
Buddhist practice is to make it through another day without letting
kleshas get the upper hand.

> It's the very aspiration to something beyond our limited
> experiences and understanding that opens our minds to develop in
> ways that were hitherto unfamiliar to us.

I suspect this may be another area in which different people are
motivated in different ways. What I have found about myself is that
I am never interested in the least by things that lie outside my
experiences and understanding. What motivates me is the possibility
of slightly refining what little understanding I already have. And I
know I can do that, because I have experienced doing that.

> "Do not bring a god down to a devil."

Very good advice. I would add only this: do not raise a human buddha
up to the station of a god.

> But, without advocating any bakti-yoga or guru devotion one might
> point out that not all people are equally helpful in this regard,
> or at least not all people have equal capacities to point out for
> me or articulate for me something important about myself.

I agree, but I would also want to add that there is no need to wait
for others to come along to point things out. One can learn a great
deal from an innocent child, not because the child is so skilled at
pointing out the nature of one's mind, but because one can learn a
great deal by observing oneself and how one responds to the
challenges posed by the child.

Learning how to observe oneself requires, of course, that one have a
clue what to look for. Here is where some kind of guidance comes in
very handy. Most of us benefit by having someone telling us, or at
least giving a few hints about, what to look for. I see
self-observation as a lot like bird-watching. I can see birds
perfectly well, but I have learned to rely on Roger Tory Peterson
and other authors of books about birds to tell me what features of a
bird to look for to make a positive identification. Similarly, in
watching myself, I have learned to rely on the Dhammapada, the
Visuddhimaggo, the Bodhicaryaavataara and a few other excellent
books by Buddhist authors and by psychologically astute
non-Buddhists. The issue is not whether one needs guidance--I think
just about all of us do need that--but whether the guidance can be
got from books alone. I think it can be. Others disagree.

> But, it is also clear that sometimes someone can because of their
> own awareness, capacities, or experience see something I don't
> see.

I take it for granted that just about EVERYONE sees things about me
that I don't see. For that reason, I think it is important to be
open to hearing feedback from from everyone, not only from gurus or
trained professionals.

When I look back at the people from whom I have learned the most
about myself, I find that they tend to be people who have pointed
out nothing to me at all. Rather, they have just listened. My mother
was a very gifted listener. She would just let me ramble on until I
realized for myself what a muddle I was in, then she left it to me
to find my way out. I learn much from people who are content to
witness me making a fool of myself. I learn next to nothing from
people who feel obliged to inform me of precisely how I am making a
fool of myself. But then, hey, I am a card-carrying introvert.
That's just my style, and it certainly will not be everyone's.

begin{quote}
 There is really no such thing as an `enlightened' individual. There
 are degrees of enlightenment: individuals who are more or less aware.
 There are individuals who perceive and act effectively in the moment
 and individuals who are caught up in preconceptions and fantasies.
 That isn't to say that there are not definite moments of revelation in
 the process of enlightenment, moments when the veil lifts and things
 become suddenly clearer. These moments will also seem overwhelmingly
 important at the time because they can have a major emotional impact.
 No matter---any moment of enlightenment that happened a week or a year
 ago is dead and buried. Enlightenment takes place in this moment, and
 it refuses to be described or frozen solid for later use. (Bancroft,
 2001, pp. 29--30)
end{quote}

> But the period around 25/12 originally had nothing to do with Christianity.
> Falling as it does near the true New Year of the winter solstice, there are
> other ancient residual causes for celebration such as the Saturnalia (though
> I'm more of a Lupercalia man myself), as well as the festivals of Sol
> Invictus (good old Julian) and I think the noble Mithras also got a look in.

Yes, the traditional date for celebrating Mithra's birth was
December 25. His symbol was the cross. As far as I can recall, there
is no mention in the bible of Jesus being nailed to a cross.  He
died on a tree. (So early Chritinaity, like early Buddhism, could
have been a tree cult.) It was after the Christians took over most
of the festivals of the Mithraic cult that the tree became a cross.
Thus have I heard.

> So happy solstice to everybody !

Glory be to the lengthening days and the augmentation of diurnal
light!

> I mean to say that the person of the Buddha is not the core issue
> for me. The Dhamma is to be lived by.

That's exactly how I feel. Borrowing a term from Christian theology,
where a distinction is often made between Theocentric and
Christocentric spirituality, I have found it useful to distinguish
among four approaches to practice: Buddhacentric, Dharmacentric,
Sanghacentric and Gurucentric. The only one that has ever appealed
to me is Dharmacentric, provided that by Dharma you mean something
like the totality of wisdom known to the human race and to the
animal kingdom as manifested in word (by which I would include
anything symbolic, such as art and architecture and dance), deed and
thought. This attitude, I gather, would be in contrast to narrower
conceptions of Dharma, which might be called nikaaya-centric,
vaipulya-centric or nyaaya-centric.

> (Some Theravada Buddhists take this so literaly that they don't
> have Buddha's in their temples)

Many years ago I went to a Thai temple in Denver, USA. They had
scores of Buddha statues. I commented on the abundance of Buddha
statues to the head monk, and wonderfully energetic Thai man in his
seventies, and he whispered back to me: "The Buddha would have hated
all these statues. He was very much against superstitions like this.
But the Thai people are very superstitious. They will give up Dhamma
before they give up their Buddha statues."

No doubt our friend Jan would see this monk's discourse as an
example of how a clever teacher was working within the framework of
the prejudices of a middle-class white guy in the heart of America.
Perhaps (yawn) he is right. Whatever the case may be, I had heard
this monk, Ven. Vivekananda Nagasiri, speaking a few months earlier
at a large pan-Buddhist conference in which he said he thinks that
the coming of Buddhism to the West is the most positive thing that
has happened to the Dhamma for more than a thousand years. Why?
Because Westerners focus on Dhamma itself instead of on statues and
superstitions. I suspect Ven. Vivekananda might be a little
disappointed to see how Buddhism is now evolving in the West. It
seems we are making up for lost time in adopting all the silly
trappings while throwing away most of the substance of Dharma.

> Buddhism in general is influenced by a huge number of Pan-Indian
> ideas. You might as well observe that Nikaaaya Buddhism is
> influenced by the Vedas in general because of the frequency with
> which Vedic gods are mentioned, and the reliance upon the pantheon
> of Vedic gods for protection, as found in the Digha Nikaaya.

Yes, most responsbible scholars do indeed argue just this way. To
speak of Indian Buddhism as being somehow isolated and uninfluenced
by the general Indian scene is as ridiculous as it would be to try
to speak of North American Buddhism as being uninfluenced by
Christianity, Judaism, Pragmatism, Marxism, Existentialism and depth
psychology.

Clearly nikaaya/aagama Buddhism is as heavily influenced by
Brahmanism and the Vedic (and anti-Vedic) movements as later
Buddhism was influenced by temple Hinduism. Why would one expect it
to be otherwise?

> Your looking at a bunch of strangers without caring for them can
> hardly be anything but superficial.

I did not say I do not care for them. I said I do not give a damn
for them. That is a colloquial expression that means only that I
have upek.saa towards them rather than attachment to them or hatred
for them. (I apologize for using a colloquial English expression
when writing to someone whose native language is not English. You
have issued very stern warnings to me about this before.)

> No inhabitants of a country as a whole are Indologists.

Quite so. And therefore you will agree with me that Tibetans on the
whole were not Indologists.

> Also: Nobody ever claimed that Tibetans were Indologists. What are you
> talking about?

I am just waiting for you to stop focusing all your attention on a
completely trivial issue so that you can begin paying some attention
to the more important point I was making in my earlier message. You
have ignored that central point while going off on a tangent that
leads nowhere at all.

Let me refresh your memory. You made the true but perfectly useless
claim that Westerners are not seeing Asian Buddhism accurately,
because they keep looking at Buddhism and seeing their own issues
there rather than the issues of Asian Buddhists. I responded that
this is pretty much what all Buddhists have always done. For
example, Tibetan Buddhists were more interested in using Buddhism as
a means of clearly seeing and then solving their own problems; they
were not studying Buddhism out of some pure intellectual curiosity
about Indian culture. So why should Westerners not look at Buddhism
as other Buddhists have done and use it as a means of seeing and
perhaps solving their own problems?

> Is one not allowed to reply to your remarks in your postings
> anymore?

I would be delighted if you would respond to my postings. So far you
have done nothing but get distracted by completely irrelevant points
of no concern to anyone rather than to the issue that was being
addressed in my posting. Now, if you'd really like to pretend to
have an intelligent conversation so that people can see how very
clever you are, why not respond to my question, which you have up
until now ignored?

The question, in case you missed it, was this: Given that Asian
Buddhists have studied Buddhism to understand themselves and their
own issues in their own cultures rather than out of curiosity about
other cultures, what is wrong with Western Buddhists looking at
Buddhism to understand themselves and their own cultural
conditioning better? To use your metaphor, when it is given that
Buddhism is supposed to be a mirror, why, when Westerners study
Buddhism, should they not see themselves in the mirror? Why should
they restrict themselves to seeing Tibetans, Mongols, Han Chinese,
Vietnamese, Bamas, Thais, Cambodians and Sinhalese and ignoring
themselves?

> if one has Guru-allergies, it can be a real obstacle to opening up
> to the possibility that another person may be further advanced on
> a specific path than oneself is

I doubt that anyone alive is unwilling to acknowledge that other
people are more advanced in some areas than himself. I cannot think
of a single undertaking I have embarked on in which it has not been
obvious to me that I have a great deal to learn from others who are
much better at it than I am. My allergy to gurus has nothing at all
to do with being unwilling to learn; rather it has to do with being
unwilling to align myself with only a single source, whether that
single source be a master, a real or imagined lineage of masters or
a particular school of religion or philosophy.

> and that by embracing them openly, one may more quickly accomplish
> ones goals

Who cares about quickly? I've never seen following the path as a
race. Hell, I don't even see it as a means towards achieving goals.
I follow the path for no other reason than I happen to like the
path. I'll probably be sort of sad if it comes to an end someday. I
might even turn around and follow the path in the opposite
direction. Or go get lost in the woods.

> in our cause, the pacification of afflictions and awakening.

Don't presume to speak for me, you young whippersnapper. YOU may be
interested in awakening and the pacification of afflicions. I have
very few complaints about life and therefore no afflictions serious
enough to require being pacified. When the rare affliction does
arise, I just wait it out until it goes away by itself. As for
awakening, I reckon that's pretty much a chunk of pie in the sky.

> But again, although Guru yoga may not be a practice for you, it is as
> deserving respect as a method as your devotion to Amitabha Buddha.

Well, thank you for stating the obvious, Malcolm. I guess I could
speculate on just why it is you feel that others do not have respect
for your chosen practice. Might you be projecting? It seems to me
that the prevailing tone on BUDDHA-L has always been one of
pluralism and deep respect for all religions (and non-religious
forms of secularism). Are you just now catching on to that fact?

On the other hand, I suppose I could speculate on why you think I
have devotion to Amitabha. I don't even think Amitabha exists, and I
assure you I am not silly enough to be devoted to figments of my
imagination. No, I just do the practice from time to time because it
requires very little effort, costs no money and is a relatively
pleasant way to spend time. (What would you expect from a liberal
such as myself, recalling Mencken's observation that a liberal is
someone who won't take his own side in a debate?)

> The reasons for studying a philosophical or meditative or devotional
> practice with a teacher may also be similar to those that we have for
> learning a language, and reading texts, with live partners, instead of
> always 'doing' them on our own.

Yes, I don't think anyone has ever claimed that one can dispense
with interacting with other human beings. Anyone who has ever had a
parent, a sibling, a child, a lover, a friend, a neighbour or a
colleague will attest to the fact that interactions with other
people are like the laboratory segment of a class in philosophy.
Books can provide us with ideals, while our interactions with others
are telling us constantly how well we are doing in living up to our
ideals. Every time one meets a bank teller, a student or a bus
driver one's "realization" is being tested.

Probably nobody tests one and teaches one better than a child or a
lover, which is why I think intimate relationships are the best sort
of spiritual practice. Monastic life, I think, is a very poor
substitute for family and friends. There is an Indian tradition that
one form of brahamacarya (often mistranslated as celibacy) is any
committed and loyal relationship with a lover.

Given the richness of human experience, there is (I would argue) no
special need for any one person to be a guru, because to anyone who
is open-minded, open-hearted and ready to learn, every living being
(and not just a few inanimate objects) are gurus. Focussing all
one's attention on a single guru seems as wrong-headed and
counterproductive as trying to live on a diet made up only of one
kind of food (unless, of course, that one food is New Mexican
chile).

> Anyway, I am not saying that Buddhism does not have rational
> elements. Only one should not overlook the aspect outlined above,
> i.e. that sometimes we may be simply looking into a mirror here.

Looking into a mirror, of course, is what every culture in the world
has done when it has looked at Buddhism. When Tibetans studied
Buddhism, they had no interest at all in understanding Indians or
Indian culture. So why should a German or American studying Buddhism
do so to understand Asians or Asian culture? Surely if a German
looks at Buddhism and does not see a German looking back at him from
the mirror, then he is failing to use the Buddhist mirror for the
purpose for which it was designed.

> The relief of peeing is the grace of the Guru, as is the sweet
> smell of flowers. All appearances arise as the Guru, ideally, even
> yours. I am not very good at such practice, but, practice makes
> perfect.

Yesterday I had a very stimulating conversation with a scholar who
has spent his life reading Abhinavagupta. One of the many
fascinating things he said was that there is a tradition of
regarding the texts of Abhinava and his teachers and commentators as
one's guru. Working on the texts and puzzling through their many
layers is said to cleanse the mind, and the resulting s'uddha-vidyaa
is the same as the effect of having a tantric initiation. I found
this an enormously appealing idea, and later on reflected on just
why I find it so attractive. Since I suspect I'm not entirely alone in
thinking as I do, I thought I'd share some of these reflections.

First of all, I grew up in a culture that placed a strong emphasis on
self-initiative and on questioning authority figures. Another aspect
of this culture was a deep suspicion of institutions and a default
assumption that all institutions eventually get around to abusing
their power and perhaps doing at least as much harm as good. (I
suppose this assumption could even be applied to such institutions as
the American presidency, but it certainly applies to every conceivable
religious structure.) Finally, I grew up in a culture that at least
pretended to admire equality (but was in fact not very good in the
practice of it). A corollary of the belief in equality was that every
teacher has as least as much to learn from students as she has to
teach them, and no teacher, therefore, can ever be regarded as an
unquestioned authority or as a figure who is always in all ways in the
role of teacher to those who are permanently in the role of pupil or
disciple.

I don't want to get into the business of defending those deeply
entrenched values just now. All I want to do now is acknowledge their
effect on many people who grew up in America in the 1950s. What those
people of my generation who turned to Buddhism initially saw it it was
a set of practices and values and teachings that liberated them from
institutions, authority figures and all those other things that
sustain human communities; we therefore also liberated ourselves from
the very possibility of having meaningful and sustainable
communities. For some, the craving for community has become a terrible
hunger, probably never to be satisfied in those who continue to resist
what they see as the "mere trappings" of religion. For others, the
need to fill the void of needed community eventually led to a shedding
of those values instilled during childhood. Among this latter group,
some shed those values so fully that they rushed to throw themselves
at the feet of gurus, swamis, zenjis and lamas. And among those who
did that, some managed to get themselves abused, thereby confirming
the deepest suspicions of those lone rangers who had never allowed
themselves to be lured into community-building institutions and
authority figures in the first place.

All of these issues are deeply emotional to all of us, and trying to
talk about them often leads quickly enough to heated and reactive
wrangling, or at least to more or less good-natured teasing. I, for
example, never tire of teasing you, Malcolm, for leaving your brain at
the door when you fell into the tantric trap, because I know I could
never in a million years accept anyone as a Zen master or a lama or a
guru. And yet I acknowledge a very profound spiritual loneliness that
comes from knowing that while others are sitting together around
roaring fires, I'm still sitting alone in the cold and dark trying to
get a few sparks out of knocking some flint stones together. My envy
for your sense of spiritual community turns into teasing, for people
always tease those who have what they long to have. You no doubt have
your own ways of wrestling with your shadow, whatever form it may
take, when you see those who grew up in the same culture as you and
are still in it and have the comfort that comes of continuity. (What
convert to Buddhism does not feel the deep ache of broken tradition
when holidays come around and he finds himself either observing them
from the outside as a spectator or even as a voyeur or uneasily trying
to reconcile participating in them with the alien beliefs he tries to
believe he has taken on as his own?)

Gregory Schopen became an academic superstar by describing Mahayana
Buddhism as a cult of the book, a cult in which physical texts came to
be seen as manifestations of the Buddha's body that were to be placed
on altars or inside stupas, offered incense, circumabulated,
prostrated to and intoned (and, on very rare occasions, even
studied). We live now in a time of the cult of books. What literate
person does not own at least one or two self-help books, these ersatz
gurus that obligingly remain silent and out of sight until we turn to
them for some tidbit of advice or comfort?

Well, these are just rambling unfocused thoughts shaken loose from a
chance conversation with a colleague who studies Abhinavagupta and
who, like me, prefers a book in the lonely dim glow of the lamp in his
library to a living flesh-and-blood guru.

> samaadhi, dhyaana :
> Can anyone help me understand how these terms differ (or not) ?

The definition of samaadhi that I have seen most often is
kusala-cittassa ekaggataa (or kus'ala-cittasya egaagrataa):
concentration of a healthy mind. This definition rules out two things:
1) a mind this is healthy but not concentrated on a single point, as
when the mind is doing a programmatic meditative exercise such as
mettaa-bhaavanaa; and 2) a mind that is concentrated but not healthy,
as for example when one is concentrating on breaking into someone's
house or on dropping a bomb on an enemy's country.

Every act of dhyaana has samaadhi as one of its features, but I
gather that samaadhi is done restricted to dhyaana. The words
therefore have both different connotations and different
denotations. (I beg a forgiveness in advance for using terms from
John Stuart Mill, a fact that will I'm sure cause some readers to
have an attack of severe logorrhea.)

> I have read an explanation recently that claims the four form realm
> concentrations as the extension of dhyaana, and the four formless
> realm concentrations as the extension for samaadhi.  Do other
> understand these terms differently ?

I have never seen that distinction. In the material I have seen, the
four formless dhyaanas are, well, dhyaanas and therefore have samaadhi
as one of their features. In the light of what Indian meditation texts
I have read (several Theravaada manuals, the Abhidharmakos'a and the
Bhaavanaa-krama), what you report would be rather odd. But I have seen
Chinese texts in which samaadhi is treated quite differently; I get
the impression that the concept took on a life of its own in East
Asian Buddhism, but this is only an impression. Perhaps some of the
experts in East Asian meditation literature can shed some light on
this.

> Without unpacking it all, it seems to me that the only way that
> you could arrive at such a notion as the spontaneous arising of
> metta from insight is through recourse to some sort of "originally
> luminous mind", Buddha-nature, tathagatagarbha, etc. doctrine

I'm not sure about this. As far as I can tell, S'antideva does not
advocate such a position, yet he does suggest that a clear
recognition of something as du.hkha leads almost automatically to
seeking a means of eliminating it, because du.hkha is by definition
that which one does not welcome. Now this does not yet add up to
compassion, because it is not yet a response to anyone else's
du.hkha. This is where insight comes into the picture. When one has
cultivated insight, then one knows there is no real and sustainable
difference between self and other. So it it no longer a matter of
making a distinction between "my" du.kha and "his" du.hkha. Du.hkha
is just du.hkha, and therefore is something to be eliminated if at
all possible.

Whether one buys this argument or not, it is an attempt to link
compassion to insight without recourse to a doctrine of aboriginal
pure mind or anything of the like.

> On the practical level, I confess to being a throwback to that silly
> old view that what you think is indeed important and will in fact
> guide your actions.

I am much less a victim of that silly old view than I used to be. What
has helped me to shake that silly old view, I suppose, have been the
following two considerations.

   1) I have become increasing aware in myself that what I think I
   believe is only one part (sometimes an alarmingly small part) of
   the totality of who I am as an agent. To use the jargon of modern
   psychology, belief is in the province of the ego, which is but one
   of the many complexes in the unconscious. But what effects
   behaviour is the totality of complexes, not just the one complex
   known as ego. In other words, I do not always act in ways that my
   official system of beliefs would lead one to predict that I should
   behave. (Officially, for example, I do not believe in getting
   angry. But a little over a year ago I raised my voice and threw a book
   in anger.)

   2) I have observed over the years that there is a many-one
   relationship between beliefs and virtues. Kindness, for example, is
   a virtue. What I have discovered is that one finds kindness in all
   kinds of people, regardless what they believe. One finds kind
   atheists, kind Communists, kind Christians, kind Muslims, even kind
   Republicans. (I have even known some people who believe in sudden
   enlightenment and tathagatagarbha to have short bursts of virtue,
   if they work up to it very gradually.)

> Non-conceptual experience might feel good

Yes, in first dhyaana it does feel good. But in fourth dhyaana it
feels neutral.

> as my colleague Carol Zaleski recently pointed out, "what's wrong
> with ecstasy?"

Carol has obviously stopped reading BUDDHA-L. If she were to tune in
to this station, she could read the words of many a sage who would
assure her that ecstacy is only another kind of du.hkha. Mind you, I
think Carol is smart enough not to fall for such clack.

> but when it comes to action in the world I prefer response
> conditioned by practice over intuition derived from self-validating
> religious experiences that are, by definition, beyond critique and
> examination.

I tend to agree with you on this. At the same time, I have to confess
that this preference is itself self-validating and beyond critique and
examination and therefore nothing to crow about. (I keep looking for
ways in which I can feel smug and superior to others, but reality
refuses to comply with my wishes.)

> And I would add that the sorry state of affairs for much of Japanese
> Buddhist history bears tragic witness to this observation.

Is there are state of affairs in any history anywhere that does not
bear tragic witness to the human condition?

> I think that the question has gotten a little different here-- if
> the question is about whether metta arises naturally in Buddhas
> rather than as a result of awakening or insight or whatever, one
> could say that if we do find such canonical evidence it would simply
> be so because Buddhas had previously cultivated the virtue of metta
> and so now that virtue arises effortlessly..  So, are there any
> places in his various bio-blurbs that say that he cultivated
> metta/karuna before awakening?

In the Pramaa.na-siddhi chapter of the Pramaa.na-vaarttika,
Dharmakiirti spends a great deal of effort to show that the Buddha's
extraordinary compassion as a buddha could have been nothing but the
result of his cultivating compassion for uncountable aeons of being a
bodhisattva. So the Buddha's compassion arose because he worked on
cultivating it, and his insight arose because he worked on that. This
seems about right to me.

In his Bhaavanaa-krama, Kamalas'iila cites a Mahayana sutra saying
that all the bodhisattva's virtues are, in the final analysis
identical, but no bodhisattva can cultivate any of the virtues without
working on them as if they were separate. One must cultivate
generosity by working on being generous, patience by reading all the
nonsense on BUDDHA-L without getting angry and so on. Only when one
has worked on all these virtues separately does one emerge as a
bodhisattva who sees that all along the virtues are so interrelated as
to be insperable and, in effect, identical. I love this passage,
because I love the idea that we can only become wise by working within
the context of our ignorance and folly.

>> I can see you have never read Yuichi Kajiyama's monograph in
>> which he proves (burying the reader in references) that
>> Mahayana Buddhism was immeasurably more misogynist than early
>> Buddhism. With respect to the attitude towards women,
>> Buddhism in India just got worse and worse, and Mahayana was
>> decidedly a carrier of that particular deterioration.
>
> Does he include Vajrayaana in his monograph.

Yes. Misogyny is at its worst there. A good many feminists concur.
(You do read feminist literature, don't you, Malcolm? Malcolm?)

>> Why, then, were so many Hindus and Buddhists at pains to show
>> that materialists who denied rebirth were falling prey to
>> wrong view? Is it your contention that all those materialists
>> were American hippies who just happened to be visiting Bharat?
>
> Such materialists, arguably, were about as common as Marxist professors
> at Boston University these days, i.e. very rare

What is your evidence for this claim? The Brahmanical
Sarva-dars'ana-sangraha states that the vast majority of Indians
were materialists. Of course I don't know what the evidence for that
claim was either. But I think it is at least possible that there
were far more materialists than the few who are referred to in
Hindu, Jain and Buddhist texts. And we can also reasonably
conjecture that the materialists kept coming up with very powerful
challenges to the religious thinkers who kept hoping no one would
notice how faulty their argumentation was. Perhaps we can even
conclude that India needed these materialists, since the religious
leaders had led most people nowhere but down the garden path.

> -- but you would think there were a lot of the them, given the
> steady stream of neo liberal crap streaming out of Universties
> like it.

Just a while ago you remonstrated with me for not using
value-neutral language when I used the f-word ("foist"). So should I
now follow your example and begin using value-neutral terms such as
"neo-liberal crap"? Please advise. Would you have me declare that,
say, the Vimalakiirti nirdes'a could best be described as
neo-liberal crap?

> you spend far more time putting down Mahaayaana then you do the
> Pali canon, and that is the measure I use to measure your bias.

Strange, I can't think of a single time when I have put down the
Mahayana as a whole. I have just put together a collection of my
Internet raving and ranting, which required my reading through some
ten thousand BUDDHA-L messages that I have written over the years.
Goddamn near gave me permanent brain damage. Oddly enough, although
I have said lots of really hare-brained things over the years, I
didn't find a single put-down of the Mahayana in all that corpus. So
you must have me confused with someone else.

It's true, I have questioned the spiritual value of Mahayana (and
Vajrayana) triumphalism, but I have also questioned Theravada
triumphalism. And if you think I have never questioned the Pali
canon, then you really have not been paying much attention at all
during the eight years you have been reading this forum. May I
suggest reading with greater care?

You seem to be at war with your own shadow. (Sorry, that's a Jungian
term; I didn't get it from the Pali canon, from the abhidharma, for
Dharmakiirti or from Kamalas'iila.) Here, just to show you how much
I respect you despite all your persistent folly, I'm going to give
you a Christmas gift of some gratuitous avuncular advice. Make peace
with yourself, Malcolm. Spend some time trying to figure out what
you really believe instead of always saying what you think your
teachers expect you to say you believe. You may find you like what
you come up with a lot more than you like being stuck in the
darkling Weltanshauung of 12th century Tibetan scholastics.

> The point, Richard, is to understand why Mahaayaana evolved in
> India and why.

No, that's not the point. The point is to understand why you
consistently diminish the value of nikaaya Buddhism and cling to the
view that Mahayana is superior, just because it says it is.

> If the way the Nikaya Buddhists were practicing was so perfect,
> there would have been no need for the devlopment of Mahaayaana

Things evolve only is response to need? Do you mean concentration
camps arose in Europe because there was a need for them? George
W.Bush stole the election because America needed a simpleton for
president? al-Qaeda organized terrorist attacks on the twin towers
because New York needed an urban renewal project? The native
Americans became Christians because they needed a better religion
than the primitive savagery they had hitherto known?

There is no need to explain why Mahayana arose. It just did. Fashions
change all the time. People like changes of style, and so some clever
people got together and wrote some new texts and foisted them off as
sutras. Or perhaps Buddhism was growing to be such a threat to Brahmans
that they hijacked it and tried to turn Buddhism into a religion that
was in almost every way indistinguishable from Hinduism. 

Triumphalism, as you probably know, is defined as the fundamental
confusion of historical accident with spiritual superiority. You
would apparently qualify as a Mahayana triumphalist.

> it is my belief that Mahaayaana grew for two reasons, a) because
> of a growing sophistication on the part of realized persons about
> the meaning and depth of Buddhahood b) because of growing
> experiential sophistication fleshing out the phenomenology of the
> path via personal experience.

Of course you believe that. It is what you were taught, and
apparently you've never thought of questioning it.

>> I see you have bought into the uncharitable caricature of
>> arhants offered in such Mahayana comedies as the
>
> I meant to refer to the arch conservative who wrote the Kathavattu.

That's KathaVATTHU, Pilgrim. The author of that was not Moggallana.
That notwithstanding, I agree with that that it is a pretty silly
text, although it is valuable as a source of information on such how
completely ridiculous just about all of Buddhism had become in just
a few generations after the founder cashed in his ruupa-skandha. My
God, if Gotama had been able to see into the future enough to see
how silly his followers would become, he would have remained under
the Bodhi tree and played with ants on the shore of the Neranjaraa
for the rest of his days.

> One of the principle exceptions I take is the universal belief
> that somehow the Pali Canon is the corner stone of how all later
> Buddhism is to be understood

Who, aside from some Theravadins, holds that view?

> It is a mean spirited ploy if intended to put others down, otherwise,
> the differences between so called hinayaana and Mahaayaana have only to
> do with one's intention.

There is no way to use the word "hiinayaana" that is not
mean-spirited to the core.

> There are many putative Mahaayaanists who are hinayaanists [narrow
> minded] in spirit.
> For example, the very uncharitable idea that women must be reborn
> as men to become Buddhas, neatly dispatched by the Goddess of the
> Ganges in the Vimalakiirti suutra.

I can see you have never read Yuichi Kajiyama's monograph in which
he proves (burying the reader in references) that Mahayana Buddhism
was immeasurably more misogynist than early Buddhism. With respect
to the attitude towards women, Buddhism in India just got worse and
worse, and Mahayana was decidedly a carrier of that particular
deterioration.

> But, in general, no Indian, or at least very few, of the period doubted
> rebirth.

Why, then, were so many Hindus and Buddhists at pains to show that
materialists who denied rebirth were falling prey to wrong view? Is
it your contention that all those materialists were American hippies
who just happened to be visiting Bharat?

>> On the other hand, one should not be entirely blind to the fact
>> that everyone who goes for refuge does so until his or her
>> awakening is complete.
>
> But this is not explicitly stated in any Nikaya text

True, the nikaayas were written for intelligent people who did not
have to have every little thing spelled out for them.

> Since you regard the Pali canon, the accepted oral record of the
> Buddha as the corner stone by which all later Buddhist thinking
> must be in reference too, and clearly do not accept Mahaayaana
> notions of text and canon-- this is your bias, and makes you a
> Gotama-ista.

I can see that you have not been paying attention at all. You have
been so busy doing battle with the Richard of your dreams that you
have been completely oblivious to anything I have actually said. If
you'll dive back through the archives, you'll find that I have never
said or even suggested that the Pali canon is the measure by which
all Buddhist thinking must be a reference. If I believed that, I
surely would not have spent the last thirty years studying and
translating Mahayana texts, nor would I have practised Zen for
decade, nor would I now be an Amitabha practitioner.

Ah well, sufficient unto the day is the blind triumphalism thereof.
I'm going to go watch the evening news and watch George Bush explain
to the people why the Iraqis need Americans to invade their country
without any provocation.

>>> Sure, the explicit goal of complete Buddhahood as opposed to
>>> arhatship, i.e., the complete eradication of all knowledge
>>> obscurations, as opposed to only eradication of afflictions.
>>
>> Trivial.
>
>Non-trivial. Completely changes one's whole aspiration.

I suppose that depends on what your mentality is to begin with. If you 
are the sort of person who won't avoid harmful actions unless there's a 
hell to punish you, or if you are the sort of person who won't strive 
to improve unless you think the final goal is the highest state that can 
possibly be reached, then Mahayana doctrines may serve as enticements 
to get you onto the path. But once you have matured a bit, you no longer 
need the glamour of anuttara-samyak-sambodhi to fetch the best in you 
that you currently have to give. I predict in another five years, 
Malcolm, you will have outgrown the need for all these pretty bells and 
whistles and will be content with moments of clarity and compassion that 
visit your mind and heart, apparently for no reason at all.

>I did call it an innovation-- again, I think you are missing the point,
>Mahaayaana texts are generally not critical of earlier texts, they are
>critical of a class of Vinaya literalists.

I have never seen this. Can you give me some examples of texts that are 
critical of Vinaya literalism?

>As such, Mahaayaana was a much needed corrective to certain kinds of 
>Buddhist fundamentalism, for example, that of Maha-moggalitissaputta.

I see you have bought into the uncharitable caricature of arhants 
offered in scuh Mahayana comedies as the Vimalakirti-nirdes'a. While that 
text is a lovely example of Indian-style parody, it is hardly to be taken 
as an accurate portrayal of the early arahants. Now if it's intelligent 
critiques of fundamentalism you're interested in, take a peak at how 
Devadatta is portrayed in the Pali canon.

>That Mahaayaana was hijacked by fundamentalists in turn is regrettable

Yes, regrettable like most inevitable things. Show me a religion that 
cannot be hijacked by fundamentalists, and I'll give you a lollipop.

>but that should not occlude the main important features of Mahaayaana.

My point all along has been that the very best of Mahayana is nothing 
but the very best of Buddhism as a whole. I therefore reject the talk of 
distinctions between one yana and another as a mean-spirited polemical 
ploy.

>Everywhere in Buddhism? For example, monks who refuse to help women
>because it may involve touching them?

Yes, that is something I have seen everywhere in Buddhism. Fortunately, 
I have also seen everywhere in Buddhism a more generous and sensible 
attitude. The point is, no yaana has a monopoly on pettiness, nor does 
any yaana have a monopoly on magnanimity.

>Really, the difference is in goal. This is why for example, there is no
>refuge in the Nikayas, or Theravada, that exceeds the present lifetime.
>In Mahaayaana one takes refuge until one's awakening is complete as a
>Buddha.

Aha. So you admit that nikaaya Buddhism is more realistic. When one is 
not at all sure that there is a life after the present one, making a 
vow to take refuge in future lives is, if you'll pardon the expression, a 
completely empty gesture, sort of like a pauper giving away an imagined 
billion dollars. On the other hand, one should not be entirely blind to 
the fact that everyone who goes for refuge does so until his or her 
awakening is complete. That's what going for refuge to Dharma means, 
nothing else. So you see, there is not even the slightest difference between 
nikaaya-yaana and vaipulya-yaana in this respect.

>Even your views can be construed as textually sectarian, Richard.

You'll have to show me how, for I fail to see it. For starters, perhaps 
you can let me know what sect I purport to advocate. Secondly, you 
might inform me on which text my alleged sectarianism appears to you to be 
founded. If you cannot do this, then once again I will have to conclude 
that you are merely being reactive and irresponsible in hurling 
predicates around, hoping they will stick.

> It's better to meditate 1hr every day than 3hr every three days
> etc.

How do you know this? How does one measure goodness? How can one be
sure that meditation does not operate on a principle similar to
weight training, where it is well known that resting for at least 48
hours between training periods is vital to making progress?

I have been meditating for thirty-five years, and it now seems to me
that meditating about twice a week for twenty minutes a time is
quite a bit better than meditating an hour a day. When I meditate
that much, I find I tend to get lazy. But perhaps twice a week is
now enough precisely because I spent so much time meditating every
day.

Again I ask: how can one pssoibly know the answer to any of these
questions?  We're all just guessing and trading opinions about these
matters.

> But I would be loathe to judge the possibility of irreversible
> states of attainment by my own achievements.

So would I. I would be loathe to judge much of anything on any
basis. I prefer being skeptical. By skepticism, of course, I mean
the word in its original Greek meaning of inquiring, being
open-minded.

What my experience seems to indicate so far is that the more time
one spends in healthy (kusala) states, the easier it is to retrieve
them when one needs them. Who knows whether they are ever so well
entrenched that they are irreversible? Who needs to know? Is it not
enough that they can be experienced by anyone who breathes, and that
those who visit them often can eventually visit them at will?

> Nirvana isn't a conditioned dharma and you can't attain it.

I have no idea what kind of a dharma nirvana is. Perhaps it is not a
dharma at all, but a theoretical abstraction that lures good folk to
ever great goodness. I guess Eisel Mazard would call it a
blandishment.

> Or alternately, "sraavakas" were not paying attention to their own
> sutras, thus necessitating the compoisition of Mahaayaana sutras
> to expand upon and make more clear certain features of the
> Buddha's teachings that were being overlooked in abhidharm
> scholasticism.

Yes, I would be very much inclined to agree with that assessment. To
some extent, as I'm sure you know, this is the thesis of Tilman
Vetter in his work on Buddhist meditation. At the risk of
oversimplification, his claim is that one finds two very prominent
currents in Thevavada, one placing an emphasis on jhaana and the
other on vipassanaa. His thesis is that the vipassanaa people became
so dominant that they effectively muted the parts of the canon that
talked of the importance of jhaana, especially the formless jhaanas
that are supposed to give an experiential foretaste of nibbaana.
This bias reaches its logical extreme in some modern Theravadin
teachers who reportedly maintain that it is impossible for anyone in
modern times to attain jhaana (and would therefore probably lead to
harm if anyone were even to try). My response to them is to quote
former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who said "Just watch me."

I don't think Vetter goes so far as to say that Mahayana sutras were
a response to the imbalance created by the hijacking of Theravada by
vipassanaa-vaadins, but it would be a possible corallary to his
thesis. I personally would favour this view, because it is the one
that best supports my own observations of the Buddhist literature I
have had a chance to read. One observation is that I have never yet
found anything in Mahayana texts that isn't to some extent
anticipated in the nikaayas and aagamas. A second observation is
that the principal contribution of Mahayana texts is merely one of
emphasis and rhetoric, rather than one of substance.

Naturally, I am influenced by my own essentially pluralistic and
relativistic mentality, which predisposes me to approve all
religions and philosophical systems (and therefore all schools of
Buddhism) while still admitting that I have a personal aesthetic
preference for some rhetorical styles over others. Thus I love the
emphasis in Mahayana on the bodhisattva ideal and on the
impossibility of arriving at neatly packaged definitions, while
loving the relative down-to-earth simplicity and humanism of the
Pali canon. De gustibus non disputandum est, eh? (That's Canadian
Latin. It means something like don't argue with the wind.)

> In several retreats with Jack Kornfield, I've heard him say that
> there is no enlightenment but only enlightened action, which, in
> the blink of an eye, can be lost again in the the course of being
> human.

This reminds me of a (very long) public performance I attended at
which Sogyal Rinpoche was holding forth on the Tibetan view of death
and dying. (I didn't learn much about dying, but I was impressed by
the fact this gem of a fellow had learned how to surround himself
with scores of nubile nymphs, as if to prove that one need not die
to go to heaven.) Although I was feeling ready to die (or at least
leave) about an hour before the lecture was over, I do recall
vividly one thing he said that I very much liked. He was talking
about how one can, through meditation, get into a very calm,
peaceful, open and accepting state. "In such moments," he said "you
say to yourself 'If I died this very moment, it would be quite
alright.' And then....you lose it."

Now THAT really spoke to my condition, and to everyone's condition I
would guess. We get into these beautiful states. And then we lose
them. We get flashes of profound insight. And then we lose them. We
get our lives all together. And then we fall apart. All this makes
one rather skeptical of the dogma that stream-entry and other
attainments are irreversible ascents into purity and goodness.

> Simply stated as a maxim, "One moment of enlightened action
> (manifestation of the Brahmaviharas) and one is a Buddha....one
> un-vigilant moment, and one is once again an ordinary person."

Sangharakshita, bless his soul, has said that he finds the doctrine
of the four levels of ariya-puggala (stream-entry, once-return,
never-return and arhattva) one of the most artificial schemata that
scholasticism ever produced. Far more important than worrying about
whether one is entitled yet to sew a stream-entrant or once-returner
badge on the sleeve of one's meditation costume is to note which
dharmas are present with the current moment of awareness and to
realize that they are likely to slip away. At the same time, the
more one visits kusala-citta, the more likely it is that one will be
able to find one's way back to there.

> It seems to me that the only way these 'states' arise is
> spontaneously. They disappear the same way.

I doubt that. I suspect that, like all things, these events are
conditioned. Your use of scare quotes around 'states' leads me to
suspect that you agree with me in seeing these events in kusalacitta
not as static but as dynamically fluid events without clear
boundaries and definitions.

> It is a very human view, and one that rightly leaves perfection to
> be something beyond our grasp.

I agree. And for this reason I was very disappointed to hear that
Sangharakshita had condemned Jack Kornfield for talking as he did of
these attainments as being temporary. To say such a thing, said
Sangharakshita, is to deny that the Buddha was a buddha and that
Nirvana is possible. And since Nirvana is the Dharma to which a
Buddhist goes for refuge, and since stream-entrants et al are the
Sangha to which a Buddhist goes for refuge, one who denies that
these states are attainable as durable and stable conditions is not
going for refuge and hence is not a Buddhist. (It always amuses me
to see someone stand up and declare who is and who is not going for
refuge properly to just the right thing. It has a tendency to make
me run for refuge in exactly the opposite direction.)

> Maintaining the attitudes suggested by the terms loving-kindness,
> compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity (my particular bete noir)
> seem to me to be not a matter of striving, but of awareness and
> willingness to look at how and when the states arise, and when they are
> inhibited.   Striving to 'create' them seems to me counter intuitive.

Perhaps, but being aware and willing to look at how and when states
arise is said to be precisely what one does to lay down the
conditions that favour the arising of these healthy states. Is there
an important distinction between creating a given state and creating
the conditions necessary for that state to arise? This is not a
rhetorical question. I am really wondering whether there is an
important distinction here.

In traditions that talk in terms of grace, it is usually said that
such things as love and hope are events that one cannot possibly
create but rather arise through grace as a gift from God.
According to many theologians of grace, these gifts are always being
offered, but they are not always being received. What one can do
through religious practice is to improve the odds that one will
receive these gifts. Quakers, for example, say that God is always
offering us guidance, but the chances of receiving it are greatly
improved when one sits still with a quiet mind and an open heart. Is
this way of talking really much different from the way that
Buddhists talk about the arising of mettaa and other forms of
kusala-citta?

> He defends a/the nihilist interpretation of the MMK.

I thought he based most of his work on the VV. But no matter.
Whether one looks at the MMK or the VV, I think this is a defensible
position, provided that one makes it clear in what sense the term
"nihilism" is being used. The principal uses of the term with which
I am aware are the following (for which I am indebted to Peter
Angeles's Dictionary of Philosophy):

1. The denial of any objective and real ground or state of truth.
2. The theory that nothing is ultimately knowable.
3. The denial of the validity of all ethical, religious, political
and social values.
4. The denial of the validity of all disctinctions.

I think one could easily defend the claim that Nagarjuna is
nihilistic in senses 1, 2 and 4, but not in sense 3.

A further notion of nihilism is:

5. The view that the universe is meaningless and without purpose and
that therefore nothing is worth striving for.

All Buddhists, I would argue, are nihilistic in this sense of the
word, for the universe is never held to have a telos (even if
individuals try to give purpose to their personal lives.) And
Buddhism holds that there is nothing worth striving for. The
cessation of striving is given a name: nirvana. That alone is seen
as a worthy goal, but not (paradoxically) a goal toward which one
can strive in no other way than by abandoning all other striving.

> My impression is that the book hasn't been received well or has
> been ignored.

I have not seen any discussion of it. I once used parts of it for a
course and was not particularly impressed with his translation
efforts. His own philosophical discussions struck me as too turgid.

> Claiming Madhyamaka was a nihilistic seems to be 'not done'. Why
> would that be?

I think a partial answer to that could be because so many people
translate uccheda-vaada as nihilism, and Buddhists are supposed to
avoid uccheda-vaada like the plague. Seeing uccheda-vaada as the
same as nihilism is a poor understanding of uccheda-vaada, although
uccheda-vaada is often taken to imply nihilism in sense 3 outlined
above.

As I understand uccheda-vaada, it is the view that there is a self
during life and that the self ceases to exist when the body dies.
This view is said by the Buddha to be favoured those materialists
(for whom the body is the self) who also deny that there is an
rational foundation for ethical norms. (Not all materialists deny
ethic norms, of course, but in the Buddha's day many reportedly did.
And because of that, uccheda-vaada is often associated with ethical
nihilism.)

Anyway, since many modern interpreters of Buddhism are very eager to
avoid any interpretation that sounds like ethical nihilism, they
tend to resist the word "nihilism" in all its meanings and thus are
wary of describing Nagarjuna as a nihilist in any sense of the word.
In short, we see an irrational taboo at work here.

> 'All morals are lost in the stupor of selfindulgence'

It could equally be argued that all self-fulfillment is lost in the
stupor of morality.

> ... Buddhism shows that the soul is an illusion

I'm not at all convinced that this is what Buddhism shows. A great deal
depends, of course, on what exactly you mean by the word "soul". There
are several senses of the word that are quite compatible with nearly
all Buddhist ways of looking at the human being.

In the first place, if by "soul" you mean that which is separate from
the physical body, then just about all Buddhism (except for some
peculiar branches in the West) are pretty comfortable with that. All
the classical Buddhism of which I am aware is quite comfortable with
mind-body dualism. The physical body is usually seen as having one set
of causes and conditions, while the four immaterial skanhdas have
another. Neither is reducible to the other. So if by "soul" you mean
something like what the Greeks called psuche, that is, the cognitive
and connative faculties of the human being, then Buddhists certainly
did accept that there is a soul. It was most decidedly not regarded as
an illusion.

In the second place, if by "soul" you follow the terminology of James
Hillman, Thomas Moore and various other authors following a
post-Jungian view of psychology, then you mean that part of the human
psyche that is "acquainted with grief" and familiar with the Slough of
Despond. It is that part of the Sacred that is not spiritual. (The
spiritual, in this usage, is that part of the sacred that deals with
ascendancy and transcendence and triumph and conquest; the soul is that
part of the sacred that deals with being defeated, with immanence, with
suffering.) In this usage, Buddhism decidedly has both much that is
spiritual and much that is soulful. (The arhant and Buddha imagos are
both spiritual and triumphal, while the bodhisattva imago is much more
soulful.) I personally find this way of looking at religion very
helpful. It is, obviously, not canonical, but it does strike me as an
aspect of modern psychology that is in no obvious way inconsistent with
what is canonical.

What Buddhism does teach, I think, is that the soul is not the self.
And all that means, really, is that the soul is not of a fixed nature
but rather is always a work in progress. It is never complete, never
perfected. Also, to say that the soul is not the self is to say that
the soul is not autonomous, that it is conditioned, that it is empty.
This view is both good Buddhism and good Jungianism. So don't be too
quick to banish a perfectly good and usable idea.

> Poll shows 2/3 of Canadians want increased defense spending.

Canadians are a lot like sheep. If the big shepherd dog in la casa
blanca says there is a big bad wolf in the woods, about two out of
three of the sheep will vote to be eaten by the shepherd dog rather
than by the wolf.

> How then do you interpret the lines, "Do not foresake your own
> good for the good of another; keeping fastidiously to your own
> good, foresake the good of every other, etc."?

I would guess offhand that it means not to get so busy refuting
Christians and making them cry that you forget to tend to the weeds
killing your own garden.

> Fair enough.  But be forewarned: you may be on the slippery slope
> to Taoism.

As Foucault said "I leave it to the bureaucrats to figure out which
drawer I am to be filed in."

>> The Buddha did say that anything that promotes happiness,
>> well-being, social harmony and health (kusalatta) is Dharma.
>
> And if you believe that, I've got a stretch of Muskeg in northern
> Ontario to sell you...

I am not much inclined to think in terms of believing things. I am
more inclined to be inspired by things. I find that when I am
sufficiently inspired, belief becomes superfluous.

The passage to which I refer, which occurs (as you know) in the
bhikkhuni chapter of the Pali vinaya, has inpsired me about as much
as anything I have read.  Something that comes close to it is the
passage from a Mahayana Sutra quoted by Kamalas'iila: "The dharmas
are innumerable, and there is no need to study them all. It is
enough if you cultivate just one: great compassion." I also derive
much inspiration from Atisha's disciple who said "If you can see
your own faults and never look for those of others, then even though
you may have no other good qualities, you are very wise."

If you wish to make a gift of the land in northern Ontario....

> You are, perhaps, familiar with an obscure document called the
> Dhammapada?

As is the case with all writings, some of that text inspires me.
Some does not. The passage you cite does not address my situation,
so I never give it much thought. I am, however, happy to let others
find inpsiration in it, if it speaks to their condition.

> This tenet that 'being yourself' is the highest virtue is a common
> blandishment, but not one that is easily supported with scripture.

And because of this deficiency in scripture I have never relied on
it alone.

> The Buddha's teaching was not that "Any illusion you may
> entertain, so long as it makes you compassionate, is just fine",
> but rather that all ignorance and all self-delusion leads to the
> emiseration of oneself and others.

The Buddha did say that anything that promotes happiness,
well-being, social harmony and health (kusalatta) is Dharma. In his
list of kusala dhammas he does mention compassion. So I take it that
he did in fact say that anything that promotes compassion is dharma.
He was not particularly obsessed with truth, except insofar as he
saw truth as that which promoted virtue and well-being.

>> [...] there is a subtle and ineffable substratum of sukha
>> beneath every apparent dukkha.
>
> Richard - did you intend this as a statement of fact, or am
> I (once again) being too literal ?

Bill, I think you have known me (in a virtual sort of way) for long
enough to know that I don't believe much in facts. What I put more
stock in is myths. And I choose my myths by a completely
non-rational trust in my own intuitions about what is good for me at
any given moment. I personally have not dervied much of value from
the myth that in every experience there is a hidden dukkha. I have,
on the other hand, gained quite a lot from the myth that embedded in
every experience is a fundamental sukha. Would that be okay with you
if I continued to embrace that myth?

> On the contrary, we ought to follow the example of the Buddha,
> and, thus, bluntly contradict all such mythology.

There are two observations I would make about this sage advice.
First, Gotama was Gotama, and I am Richard Hayes. What I need to do
is be as good as possible at being Richard Hayes, and I am unlikely
to achieve that if I try to make myself as much like Gotama as
possible. So while his example in some matters may be of some
limited use to me, I do not see the point of following his example
in all aspects of life.

Secondly, I suppose the aspect of Buddhism that appeals most to me
personally is that of striving to reduce the suffering of others.
I can't think of any time in my own personal experience when bluntly
contradicting others has done much to reduce their suffering.
Perhaps the only people I have known who might stand to benefit in
some way from being contradicted are young men so full of
testosterone that they have developed Wrathful Manjushri complexes
and feel a need to romp around with their swords of wisdom cleaving
everyone else's beliefs in twain. (Such fellows are usually drawn to
the most superficial and shallow Buddhist philsophers, such as
Nagarjuna.) But bluntly contradicting a man in the throes of a
Manjushri Complex tends only to feed the complex and make it worse.
So even a person like that is not helped by being refuted. So I have
come to prefer listening to others over bluntly contradicting them.

> Therefore, I do not think it un-Buddhist if one is so blunt in
> refuting Theism as to make the theists cry.

Not un-Buddhist perhaps, but inhumane. And if forced to make a
choice, I suppose I'd rather be humane than Buddhist.

>Kant wrote such bullshit that I wonder that anyone bothers with it any more.
>Essentialism (atman) to the core.

Perhaps you have read a different Kant than the one I read. My take on 
him is that he helped pave the way for all the non-essentialist 
thinking that has taken hold in Western philosophy for the past century and a 
half. After all, it was Kant who argued better than anyone before him 
had ever done that we can never get to Dinge-an-sich but only to our 
impressions of them. It was Kant who convinced the world, therefore, that 
science and religion (already in a terrible deadlock by his time) are 
both purely human contrivances that operate on assumptions that it is 
apparently built into human beings to make but that might not be built 
into rabbits and dolphins and gods to make. Because these assumptions, 
when taken to their logical conclusions, lead to self-contradictions, 
both science and religion are built upon shaky foundations.

It would be up to later people to take some of these ideas further and 
to argue that some of what Kant thought was universally human 
projections (as opposed to objective realities passively discovered by the human 
mind) might indeed only be common European projections rather than 
universal human projections, but without Kant having made his case as well 
as he did, it would have been much harder for later people to make 
their case.

Oddly enough, I see in Kant the turn in European thinking that made it 
possible for Europeans to understand Buddhism well and take it 
seriously. I vote for making him an honorary Buddhist saint.

>Moreover, philosophers have done nothing to improve the suffering of
>humanity for the past several centuries.

Surely the same sentence would be true if in place of "philosophers" 
you substituted any of the following words:  "priests", "monks", 
"politicians",  "generals", "corporate executives", "anthropologists", 
"historians", "architects", "poets", "geologists", "plumbers", "pacifists", 
"activists", "bankers", "contemplatives", "bicycle mechanics", 
"ornithologists", "cartographers", "engineers", "physicians", "librarians", 
"cartoonists", "fathers", "mothers",  and even "subscribers to BUDDHA-L". 
Well, perhaps in the last substitution I go too far.

>  Perhaps philosophy should be dubbed the "futile science"?

That designation would surely not distinguish it from any other human 
enterprise, would it?

> Oh I am ashamed Brother Dayamati, I am. I find it very difficult
> to be charitable towards Christian views, and all to easy to be
> critical.

It is a most grievous failing, one to which many a Western Buddhist
has fallen prey. And yet, with earnest effort and work (and with the
gracious help of God Almighty), even a sophisticated Buddhist
convert who has memorized Russell's "Why I am Not a Christian" and
large tracts of Mark Twain and Sangharakshita, can be cleansed of the
unseemly habit of making mirth of the faith that sustains others as
they turn with us on this dreary samsaric wheel.

> I am angry far too often and it is a constant battle for me to
> find kindness and generosity in my heart.

Have you considered moving to America and buying a gun? It is the
Land of Opportunity for those who prefer bullets and bombs to
kindness and generosity.

> I am in every way a bad Buddhist

Oh stop bragging about your humility, Brother Michael. I am a far
worse Buddhist than you!

> At times it makes my humour a little harsh perhaps, and you seemed
> to have missed the ironic and lampooning elements of my posts. I
> notice that your humour also falls flat on occasions despite your
> wisdom and compassion.

Yes, humour tends to fail us when unresolved emotional issues are
still at play in the psyche. I grew up in a household in which there
was undisguised and frequently voiced scorn for all Muslims, Jews,
Christians, Hindus and Buddhists without any exception. My father is
an atheist with all the fervour and fever of a fundamentalist
evanglist. He and I still have heated arguments about religion,
which he always wins (as fathers invariably do). He celebrates his
victories over my feeble logic by storming out of the room reciting
the sacred mantra "Horseshit!"

> I think Jehovah has come to represent all that oppresses me

Everyone, I suppose, needs a single thing upon which they can blame
everything that has gone wrong in their lives. And since Buddhists
have no selves to blame, it is handy to have Jehovah. (Of course
Buddhists are meant not to believe in God any more than they believe
in selves, but we can overlook this little indiscretion.)

> I'm a little like Capt. Ahab I suppose. Jehovah is my white whale

Aye, Captain. And my white whale is intolerance, which I have never
learned to appreciate any more in atheists and Buddhists than in the
Christians in my native land who quoted the Bible to justify first
slavery and then racial segregation, and quoted the Bible to justify
taking an entire continent away from the allegedly godless people
who lived here before the Europeans invaded, and who still quote the
Bible to justify preparing for Armageddon. What we have in common,
you and I, is that we have chosen to chase our respective white
whales with lampoons rather than harpoons.

Someone whose gift with words has brought me much comfort is Swami
Vivekananda. He pointed out more than once that it is not Jehovah or
Allah or Krishna or Shiva who answers our prayers. Rather it is we
ourselves who answer our prayers by drawing on our own strengths,
which we sometimes do more effectively when we put the name of some
god to those strengths. Similarly, I think it is important to be
ever mindful that it is never Jehovah or Allah or Shiva or Kali who
tells people to blow themselves up on Israeli buses, or who tells
people that some land or other is theirs as a God-given right, or
who tells men to stone women who have committed adultery or to
abominate homosexuals or to kill tyrants. It is we ourselves who
falsely give the gods credit for all our own greed and hatred and
delusion. It is not Jehovah who is the tyrant, but the man or woman
who claims to be doing God's work while destroying, killing, maiming
and threatening. And it is the person who fails to see the tyrant in
himself who lets a harmless sardine grow into a great white whale
who is destined one day to destroy him.

I hope you realize that none of these words are actually mine. I
just sat at my keyboard and wrote down what Hanuman dictated to me.
If you must blame anyone, blame him.

> You're playing your 'game' again. I never said (nor did the Buddha) that
> every apparent pleasure is attended by pain.

The only "game" I am playing is trying to mkae some sense of what
could possibly be meant by the expression "suffering of change".
Does this mean that change itself IS suffering? Or does it mean that
suffering accompanies change? The first of these two possibilities
makes no sense to me at all. The second makes very good sense to me
if it is understood as the possibility of experiencing pleasure and
then having it undermined by a nagging worry that the pleasure will
end. Pleasure can end in one of two ways: the external conditions go
away, or one becomes so used to the pleasure that it ceases to be
interesting and hence ceases to be pleasure.

> The suffering of suffering accompanies pain, for most beings.
> Again, you place suffering of change into this category.

Because I have no other categories in which to put it. And because I
am not at all convinced this notion of the suffering of change makes
any sense as a category unto itself. Sorry to say this, but it
simply strikes me as an utterly vacuous expression by itself. So I
crave something that has content and makes sense. What makes sense
to me is that there is exactly one kind of dukkha, namely, dukkha
itself (or what you are calling the dukha of dukha). Anything that
is not dukkha is, well, not dukkha. Pretty simple and easy to grasp,
eh?

> It's my opinion that clinging can be masked by enjoyable
> experiences. It is only after they cease to be enjoyable that the
> nature of suffering is apparent to us.

So what do you take this to mean? I would be inclined to say that
first there was a great deal of pleasure without any pain
whatsoever, and then there was boredom or perhaps regret or
resentment that the pleasure had stopped and that this negative
attitude was painful.  What need is there for the idea that the
pleasure was masking a hidden clinging? Why not say, with Sri
Ramakrishna, that pain temporarily masks one's deep and abiding joy?
Why speak of masks at all? Why not say that pleasure is pleasure and
pain and pain and sometimes we experience one and sometimes we
experience the other?

> If one can scrutinize pleasurable experiences, while one
> experiences them, and not reduce the pleasure, then maybe (just
> maybe) clinging is absent.

I think this is indeed just the kind of test one can perform. While
in the middle of pleasure, imagine it coming to a stop and see
whether the pleasure is spoiled. (Why the hell anyone would be
stupid enough to spoil pleasure in this way is beyond me, but I am
just granting that it is the sort of experiment that an idiot
determined not to find any pleasure in life might perform.) If one
does perform this experiment and finds there is no diminishing of
pleasure, then I would say that definitely (just absolutely
definitely) clinging is absent.

> If one has any concern that such a scrutiny will reduce the
> pleasure, I feel that would certainly indicate clinging.

Naturally. No one, I suspect, would dispute that.

> If, under this scrutiny, it is possible to appreciate which
> direction our experiences are taking us, I think that is very
> practical.

Yes, it has the practical effect of spoiling pleasures. But why
would one do that? Life is full enough of sorrows that one need not
go looking for them.

> We cannot stop suffering except by stopping its causes. With the
> suffering of change, the causes can be stopped through
> consideration of this doctrine.

I'll take your word for this. It seems a very cumbersome way of
going about the task. Why do you see it as preferable to simply
accepting the fact that everything inevitably changes, and therefore
there is no point clinging to things? When pleasure comes, one
accepts it. When it leaves, one lets it go without any regrets. That
seems a very simple thing to do. One has no need for bizarre and
complex doctrines to accomplish such a simple thing.

> Generally speaking prapanca in Tibetan Buddhist texts refers to a
> _proliferation_ of thoughts and concepts which are predicted on a
> reification of existence or non-existence.

That would be an example of what I was referring to as a fairly
specific understanding of the term. That is, it is a notion based on
a sectarian commitment to a particular school's view of what is
true. Prapanca is then defined with reference to tht conception of
truth. Your usage of the term prapanca seems very close to what
other schools would probably call d.r.s.ti.

> When I see Indian Madhyamaka authors use the term, I see them use
> prapanca much the same way.

Oddly enough, when I see Indian Madhyamaka authors use the term, I
see them using it rather differently. I suggest this may be because
we all read texts through the lens of our previous training. My
training has been exclusively in Indian philosophy, while yours has
been in Indian philosophy as reinterpreted by Tibetan, mostly
Sa-skya, scholasticism. It is natural that we would read the same
texts in importantly different ways. The question of which way is
right is, to my mind, a complete non-issue. There can be differences
without either side being right to the exclusion of the other.

> So in general, I do not think it is at all fair for you to
> criticize my usage of proliferation as a rendering of prapanca
> since it sums up quite nicely a great deal of the variant meanings
> the term has.

Oh for God's sake, Malcolm, lighten up. Don't they have humour where
you're from? Could you not detect the fact that I was being ironic
when I chastised you for mistranslating the term? Give me some
credit, for Christ's sake. I have been studying this stuff since
before you were born. Do you seriously think I am unaware of the way
you understand prapanca?

> And it is quite frequently seen, so really, I think you need to be
> a bit more generous than you are.

Now that I think of it, of course they don't have a sense of humour
where you come from. I keep forgetting, you live in the United
States. Joking about anything is now a federal offense down there,
isn't it? Isn't laughing now considered a form of terrorism?

> Your opinions are often quite arbitrary and when challenged, are
> found to reflect your own prapanca.

Of course. Anyone who is saying anything at all is reflecting his or
her own prapanca, in at least one of the many senses of the term. My
opinions are not at all arbitrary. They are simply formed by my
background, which differs somewhat from your own. My opinions are
based on my study of Buddhism, and my study of Nyaaya and Yoga and
Vedaanta and Jungian psychology and the writings of numerous Quakers
and William James and Charles S Peirce and Richard Rorty and
countless Western thinkers and the full range of Chinese
philosophers. I have found all of them useful, but I have found none
of them worthy of accepting to the exclusion of the others. More
than any of that study, my opinions have been formed by my strange
habit of listening carefully to people and taking what they say
seriously. Oddly enough, my openness to so many approaches to the
human condition has had the effect of significantly reducing the
amount of prapanca (in the sense of obsessive clinging to a
particular view) in my soul. As for prapanca in the sense of
reifying existence and non-existence, it has been so long since I
did any of that sort of thing that I can't even remember it.

> Richard's game here seems to be to address this - the 'suffering
> of change' - as if it were the suffering of suffering, hence
> making it appear ludicrous that anyone could suffer all the time.
> I fail to see the point in this.

This is not quite my "game" as I see it. My point is that while
duhkha-duhkha (the distress of physical pain) is pretty obviously
painful, it is much less obvious to me that there is distress on
account of change unless there is also clinging.  And it is not
obvious to me that clinging is always present except in stream
entrants and other ariya-puggala. I do not mean to make this
doctrine sound ludicrous. I simply mean to question whether it makes
good sense.

Most of all, I mean to ask whether this teaching is practically
useful. It feels to me very much like a doctrine-driven point rather
than a result of careful observation. (After all, how can one
observe anything that is defined as being too subtle to perceive?)
What I personally find much more helpful is the idea (found in such
works as those of Bhikkhu Gunaratana) that all of us experience real
pleasure unmixed with pain sometimes, and all of us experience real
pain unmixed with pleasure sometimes. What one gets through practice
is that one gets much better at experiencing pleasurable states with
increasing consistency. Eventually (so we are told) one gets to a
state where one experiences a steady flow of pleasant states,
unmixed with worry, doubt, anxiety, shame, guilt and so forth. We
just gradually get better (or, when things go badly, worse) at
being consistent in this respect.

What do you see as the main ways in which the doctrine that every
apparent pleasure is attended by pain helpful? And is it so helpful
that you find it important to dismiss other ways (such as my way) of
seeing the path of practice as misguided or wrong-headed? What
stands or falls with getting this doctrine "right"?

>> A prapanca is a fixed idea, that is, an idea or topic that one
>> just cannot let go of.
>
> Could I ask you to speak a little more on this?

What you are asking for is prapanca, that is, amplification that
sheds light on a cryptic statement. (More about this later.) Very
well, here is the prapanca you asked for.

According to the Pali Text Society Dictionary, the word "papanca" in
Pali texts refers in general to any impediment, especially of an
intellectual or emotional nature. Some philologists have even
suggested that the word is etymologically linked with the Latin
impedimentum. Be that as it may, "papanca" seems to have been used
generically as any kind of bad thinking that gets one into trouble
(dukkha). It is, by definition, any manner of thinking that ought to
be recognized as counterproductive and then avoided. In my
discussion of the term in my book on Dignaga, I finally decided to
render the term generically as "diseased thinking," with the
understanding that what one regards as diseased depends entirely on
what one regards as healthy.

Slightly more specific than just dysfunctional or diseased thinking
in general, Pali texts have passages in which "papanca" refers not
to the content of any particular idea or dogma but rather to a
psychological fixity, an inability to see things in any other way.
So it can be seen as the opposite of mental and emotional
flexibility, the capacity to see things from several points of view
and to accept differences in perspective. So in this usage papanca
is not so much believing the wrong things but rather believing
anything at all with a dogged determination of the sort that results
in a closure of the heart and mind.

As far as I have been able to see, "prapanca" in Sanskrit Buddhism
loses this generically obsessive connotation and comes to be
identified with whatever kind of thinking the author of a text
disapproves of. If one is committed to some form of non-dualism, for
example, then prapanca means believing in the reality of the
manifold and losing sight of the underlying unity of things. (This
is also how the term is used in the Advaita Vedaanta of Sankara.
This advaitic reading of the term strongly influenced TRV Murti and
the panditas who helped Mervyn Sprung read Candrakiirti. This is
why Murti and Sprung's Candrakiirti comes across as sounding so
much like a Vedaantin.)

If one is committed to some form of apophatic tradition, on the
other hand, then prapanca may be seen as any sort of clinging to a
view of any kind. Candrakiirti seems to interpret Naagaarjuna this
way. (I also lean toward such a reading of Naagaarjuna as a radical
skeptic who questions every view so thoroughly that the mind finally
tires of clinging to views and becomes completely pliable and
multifaceted. This portrayal of Naagaarjuna appears in my book on
Dignaaga.)

In summary, in Sanskrit Buddhism, "prapanca" is what Luis Gomez has
called a cypher term. That is, it is a word that does not denote
anything in particular but invariably connotes something
intellectually objectionable. It comes to be something rather like
the term "bete noire" (excuse my lack of circumflex) in that it
refers to whatever it is that one personally does not like very
much. It is by his betes noires that you can know the nature of a
man; similarly, it is by what he regards as prapanca that you can
know the nature of a Sanskrit-using Buddhist author.

As an aside, I am inclined to think of prapanca in Jungian terms as
something very much like a complex, that is, an emotionally charged
idea that one just cannot help reacting to with a large amount of
emotional energy but about which is not fully aware of the many
reasons for its having such an emotional impact. In this respect, it
is something in what Jung called the Shadow, the psychologically
active part of one's psyche about which one has only dim awareness.
This, to my way of thinking, gets us back to the generic usage of
"papanca" as some kind of diseased thinking that stirs up trouble
and at the same time expands (prapancayati) the idea to include some
of the insights of modern psychology. (Why should we limit ourselves
to psychological models devised 2500 years ago?)

There are two further uses of "prapanca" in Sanskrit in general that
are interesting. In the grammatical tradition a "prapanca" is an
amplification of an obscure rule that renders it more accessible. It
is close to what we now might call "unpacking a proposition" in
order to get at what it really means. It could be from this usage
also that the notions of "amplification" come into Sanskrit Buddhist
usage. A second meaning of "prapanca" that is interesting is its
usage in dramaturgy, where it refers to a silly dialogue of the sort
that one might find between two fatuous characters who are so full
of themselves that they have no idea how foolish they are in the
eyes of others. I think this usage also bleeds into Sanskrit
Buddhism to some extent. Accusing another of prapanca is a way of
accusing him or her of being a pompous fool.

More than once since I helped found BUDDHA-L, I have thought it
might better have been called PRAPANCA-L. We certainly do see lots
of it around here, in all the meanings described above: obsessive
fixity to particular views and perspectives, amplification of ideas
ad nauseam, and foolish prattle. (As many a reader has kindly
pointed out over the years, no one generates more of this stuff than I.)

>If, at some time, there is not clinging,  then one of the twelve nidanas
>is missing - the set is broken. Sometimes, I've heard the nidanas spoken
>of as a multitude of sets. If there's no clinging - presumably in any of
>the sets, then all of the sets are broken.

I don't think it is meant to be seen in such a linear and literal way. 
When one looks very closely at the relationships among the nidaanas, it 
seems that several of them are understood more as necessary than 
as sufficient conditions. I think that is the case when one looks at the 
relationship between feeling and what follows it. That is, while it is 
obviously true that without a feeling of pleasure there will be no 
desire and clinging and so forth, it is not at all obvious that whenever 
there is pleasure, there will be attachment to it. Indeed, I would say, 
on the basis of personal experience, that it is not at all the case that 
pleasure necessarily gives rise to attachment. I would even say that it 
is not entirely obvious to me that all desire leads inevitably to 
clinging and then to disappointment.

I think, for example, of Dharmakiirti's acknowledge that the Buddha had 
a lust (kama) for helping distraught sentient beings. Surely this was 
the sort of robust desire that led to no disappointment. (The Buddha was 
hardly devastated by his failure to save the world; only a neurotic 
with a saviour complex would let failure to achieve an impossible task 
lead to personal misery.) My suspicion is that Buddhas are really not that 
different from the rest of us. If they can have strong desires without 
experiencing frustration and disappointment, it is only because we can 
all do it. The difference between a buddha and someone like you and me 
is that a buddha is probably a lot more consistent than we are at being 
able to avert disappointment when desires are not fulfilled.

One could of course argue that the attachment is too subtle to be felt, 
but that would really be begging the question. That  would be a 
conclusion based solely on a priori considerations. It would be a kind of 
conclusion to which one was driven by being already convinced of its truth. 
Some scholastics, especially those with a strong polemic bent whereby 
they were determined to show that Buddhism was superior to rival paths, 
were prone to such reasoning. Some people are evidently still prone to 
this sort of reasoning, but, like all essentially circular thinking, it 
is really not very convincing when one thinks about it more carefully.

> There are many reasons to translate prapanca as "proliferation", not
> least of which being that in Tibetan prapanca is rendered as "sbro pa".

I have never heard of that Tibetan word, nor have nay of my Tibetan
dictionaries, but in general I do not place much confidence in
Tibetan translations, especially when the meaning of a term is well
attested by Sanskrit usage.

The term prapanca was most commonly used to refer to the process of
supporting a theory, especially when the theory was challeneged. It
can be seen as a kind of intellectual damaga control. As a
psychological tendency, it refers to the obsessive nature of arguing
for a position long after it is no longer necessary. For that
reason, it is very often translated as "obsession".

> Your tactical strategy of dismissing standard translation equivalents as
> meaningless in order to prove your point are specious at best.

Translating prapanca as "proliferation" is not at all standard,
except perhaps in Tibetan circles. It is one of many possible
translations. But with reference to your prapanca, what is more apt
is the obsessive nature with which you make the same point over and
over again without offering any further evidence. We all know your
position. It has been duly noted. Some agree with you. Others do
not. So drop it. Let it go. Not to let it go is obession, translated
into Pali and Sanskrit as "prapanca".

> It is an interesting exercise to compare an emphasis on process to an
> emphasis on goals - for it is a comparison that recurs in many different
> settings.

It seems that more and more people are seeing the importance of this
distinction. In educational circles it is now fairly common to hear
people saying that one of the factors that most sours the experience
of getting an education for students is their obsession with
results: getting good grades, getting a degree, getting a good job
and so forth. (I fully realize that it may seem easy for somebody
who always got very good grades, got a good degree at a good
university and then got a very fulfilling job to say that none of
these things is really important at all. At the same time, I would
say that no one knows better than the person who has reached goals
just how shallow the satisfaction of reaching goals is.)

When I think back on the aspects of Dharma practice that I have
found most deeply rewarding, something that comes most quickly to
mind is my long collaboration with Brendan Gillon. For the better
part of twenty-five years he and I have read Sanskrit texts
together. We simply read texts and try our best to understand them.
We never compete with each other to see whose understanding is
better. Neither of us has any vested interests in reading our own
many prejudices into the texts we read; we simply do our best to try
to understand what is being said and why. We're not even interested
in publishing our findings. We just love the process of trying to
understand a text on its own terms. There is something exhilarating
about working together with another person to come up with
understandings that neither of you could have come to by working
alone.

Although improving our character is rarely on our minds as a goal, I
am convinced that this process does eventually make one much more
patient, open-minded and emotionally resilient. In fact, I would say
that reading texts in this way probably leads to results every bit
as quickly as doing meditative exercises that are designed
specifically for the goal of improving one's character.

Many years ago, the son of a friend of mine tried to commit suicide
after a meditation retreat. He was found in the zendo covered with
blood after slashing his wrists and trying to cut his own throat.
His life was saved, and he explained that his despair had come about
because he had made a strong resolve to attain enlightenment during
the retreat, but he had failed. (FAILED?!?! How the hell can someone
FAIL at meditation? The very idea makes no sense to me, but it made
enough sense--bad sense-- to this poor guy that he tried to end his
own life.)

Although I never set out to become content in my mediocrity, I have
managed to do so. And the reason, I think, is that I have never
taken seriously the supreme goals (paramaartha) of any religious
tradition. I meditate because I love to meditate. I do yoga because
I love to do yoga. I read Sanskrit because I love to read Sanskrit.
I study philosophy because I love to study philosophy. I wash the
dishes because I love to wash the dishes. And I write because I love
to write. (If anyone reads it, that is okay, too, but being read is
not the goal.) I think Malcolm would be a lot happier if this
self-indulgent and goalless life were filling me with deep regrets
and feelings of dissatisfaction. Unfortunately, I cannot oblige him,
for which I apologize.

Thanks, Lee, for a thought-provoking message. Now I will go grade
some more papers, despite the fact that I hate to grade papers. (I
regard giving grades as a form of institutionalized assault that
demeans both the grader and the gradee. But, like any other kind of
prostitution, it pays the rent and gives me the means to indulge my
addictions to reading Sanskrit texts and meditating.)

> This appears consistent with the sutta noted below that makes the
> distinction between the khandhas and the five clinging khandhas, with
> the difference being that the five clinging kandhas are the kandhas
> "accmpanied with mental fermentation" or proliferation.
>
> See http://www.accesstoinsight.org/canon/samyutta/sn22-048.html

Yes, it is that sutta, along with a few other passages that I would have
to hunt around for, that gives me courage to say that the khandhas are
upaadaana-kkhandhas only when aasavas and papa~nca are present. But I have
never seen any suggestion anywhere that the aasavas (fermentations) and
papa~nca (proliferation) are constantly present in the minds of those who
are not yet at the level of stream-entry. The sutta you cite also makes
it clear that the clinging-aggregates are so called because they have the
potential to be objects of clinging. One does not usually speak of a
potential when one is talking about a constant state. So if the aggregates
were constantly the object of clinging, one would say just that, rather
than saying that they are liable to be objects of clinging when certain
conditions are present.

For what it's worth, my partner and soul-mate used to be a Gelug nun, and
she says she was constantly hearing her teachers say that du.hkha is
pretty much the constant condition of everyone who is well along not on
the path. She says it was the tendency of her Tibetan teachers to stress
with untiring insistence how remote the goal is from wherever one now is.

The constant reference to goals (especially allegedly remote ones) opposed
to the process itself is a factor that discourages many people, I find,
and becomes a factor in their dropping Buddhism in favour of other systems
that offer the same beneficial practices without the off-putting packaging
that so often finds in Buddhist contexts. In my own case, I am pretty sure
the main reason I have been able to stick with Buddhism for more than
thirty years is that I have steadfastly turned a deaf ear to all talk of
goals and have just enjoyed the practices and all the pretty flowers and
nice incense. Sometimes being superficial really helps one maintain quite
an acceptable level of happiness.

>> The upadaana- skandhas are so called because
>> they contain everything to which it is possible to cling.
>
> They are results of afflictions, and are therefore afflicted. Whatever
> is afflicted is suffering, just as whatever is conditioned is
> impermanent, and all phenomena are not self.

Oh, I see. It's all a matter of definition. This is the same method
by which you once figured out that all sexual activity is afflicted
(except then you were calling it defiled). You seem to be pretty
good at defining away everything that frightens you. Perhaps as your
fears subside, your definitions will also disappear.

> Hence, the upadaana skandhas are suffering by nature.

Right, when one is clinging to the skandhas, one suffers. But from
this it does not follow that one is always clinging to them. In
other words, the skandhas are not always upaadaana-skandhas, just as
a lotus is not always blue and a cheek is not always pink.

>> Yes, yes. Welcome to Buddhist Dogma 101. To say that there
>> are three kinds of suffering does not add up to saying that
>> everyone (except stream-entrants and other noble pudgalas)
>> is suffering all the time. What it adds up to is simply
>
> Yes, actually it does.

Well, if it makes you happier to believe that, then who am I to stop
you? After all, I love it when people are happy. And as long as your
way of being happy is only to believe that everyone else is unhappy
and not to actually go around making everyone else unhappy, then I
suppose your belief is harmless enough. You're welcome to it.

> People, except stream entrants, etc., are always actively clinging to
> something.

I see. And you are quite sure this is true? I mean you do have some
sure-fire method, such as perhaps a form of telepathy, by which you
can survey the contents of every mind in the universe at every
moment to assure yourself that every sentient being is clinging to
something at every moment? If not, then I'm tempted to suggest that
you may be making an unsupportable claim or even a wild guess. You
might even be exhibiting a prejudice.

> Agreed, one can avoid avoidable forms of suffering. Other kinds of
> suffering, happiness for example, are harder to avoid.

Oh, I don't know. I think if you worked really hard at convincing
yourself that all happiness is in fact suffering, you could probably
manage to spoil just about every potentially happy moment of your
life. People tend to find what they set out to find. If you set out
to find dukkha everywhere, you can probably do it. For myself, I
prefer to enjoy joy whenever it arises, accept it for what it really
is, and then let it go.

> Only if you beleive there are truly pleasurable feelings, feelings which
> are not in anyway conducive to suffering at all.

Feelings in themselves can be conducive to anything. If one is not
attached to them, then they are not in any way conducive to
suffering. And if you stop being afraid of happiness, I find, it
becomes much easier to experience it without any attachment
whatseover.

> However, whatever is afflicted is suffering. Since afflictions
> dominate the minds of sentient beings, they are constantly
> suffering.

Again, I can only say that if such a belief helps you make it
through the night, then go for it. Just don't expect everyone to
agree with you. And try not to comfort yourself by assuring yourself
that those whose experiences have been happier than your own are
fools.

> Clinging is not required for du.gka-- because the suffering of the
> conditioned is defined as the mere impermanence of conditioned
> things and requires no experiencer per se.

But impermanence is no problem at all for those who do not cling.
Trust me on this one, Malcolm. Arhants and buddhas, for example, are
not bothered by impermanence, so they say. And I say that not every
common person is always clinging. When we do, then impermanence
hurts. When we don't, it doesn't.

> Richard, don't be silly-- it is not a mad proposition to understand that
> everything is suffering.

Can you prove that? I'm sure you'll be able to concoct some
definition by which the very nature of sanity is to believe,
preferably without adequate evidence, that everyone is always
suffering.

> To the extent that people make excuses for things and refuse to
> recognize suffering as suffering, to that extent people simply do
> not relinquish that which makes them suffer

Similarly, to the extent that people refuse to recognize happiness
as happiness, they will pretty well always be incapable of being
happy. And to the extent they do that, then they will not relinquish
that which makes them suffer.

> since prior to the path of seeing, all mental factors are
> characterized as afflicted, all states of mind are afflicted, and
> everything afflicted is suffering.

So you keep saying--almost as if you were clinging to this view. I
wish there were something I could do to make your burden lighter,
but I cannot do anything so long as you not only refuse to let go
but also insist on adding more and more weight to your already heavy
burden.

> That is a form of suffering-- to not be clear about what is and what is
> not suffering.

Quite so. If you fail to recognize happiness and happiness, bliss as
bliss and joy as joy, then everything will be suffering for you.
And, given that misery loves company, you'll naturally wish to
convince yourself that everyone around you is in constant suffering,
too.

> your assertions about suffering do indeed contradict treatises
> written by those who we can assume were as least as interested in
> these questions as we are today

I have not yet seen any evidence for this claim you make. My
original claim, which I made in a message in response to Philip
Ernest, is that I have never seen a Buddhist text that said that
everyone is suffering all the time. I still have not seen such a
text. All I have seen is how you choose to interpret a text. But
don't worry about it. Even if you can produce a text that assures me
that everyone is suffering all the time, I'll not be convinced,
because it flies in the face of both observation and reason.
Moreover, I simply do not find it a helpful doctrine, and I have a
strange preference for doctrines that I find helpful.

> and to dismiss their writings as "dogmas" is a disservice both to
> them, and to those like myself who are interested in understanding
> them.

A dogma is nothing more nor less than a teaching. That is what the
word means. I did not dismiss anyone's writings as dogmas. I simply
said, non-dismissively, that they are dogmas. And I would add that,
unlike many dogmas in many religious, including Buddhism, the dogma
that everyone (except stream-entrants and other ariya-puggala) is
suffering all the time is not supported by either empirical
observation of others, or by intuition or by sound reasoning. And,
since there is no compelling reason to adopt such a view, I happily
join ranks with Philip Ernest in declining to adopt it. So you may
continue to cling to it without fear that we will try to wrench it
out of your hands and take it away from you.

> You apparently missed Shariputra's discuourse on suffering...

On the contrary, I know it quite well.

> Since the five aggregates are by nature suffering, the hyperbolic
> statement is the correct one.

You need to read it again, my literalistic friend. It says the five
skandhas affected by clinging. But when clinging is not present, there
is no dukkha. And that, I think, is quite a bit of the time for many
people. So I do not stand corrected.

> Similarly for absences; which of our senses receive
> impressions of absences ?

The knowledge of absences turns out to be a surprisingly thorny problem
among Buddhists. There was a Buddhist philosopher named Is'varasena who
took the position that absences are known simply by non-observation.
One knows, for example, that there is no rhinoceros in the bathtub by
seeing the absence of rhinocerosity there. Dharmakiirti, however,
argued that such a position is untenable. For one thing, this position
could lead to the unwanted conclusion that whatever one does not
observe must be absent; but this is not what one wants to say, because
surely there are existent things in the bathtub (microbes, atoms and
perhaps angels and other spirits, for example) that are by their very
nature unobservable to us. One is aware of an absence, he argued, only
if one is consciously looking for something and failing to observe it.
One then draws an inference of the form "If there were a rhinoceros in
the bathtub, then I would see it. But I do not observe any rhinoceros.
Therefore, every rhinoceros is absent from my bathtub. "
But while being aware of the absence of the rhinoceros in the bathtub,
one might completely overlook the absence of sharks, whales,
battleships, the continent of Africa and Martha Stewart in the bathtub.
Being aware of the absence of each of these requires a separate act of
consciously seeking, failing to observe and then drawing the
appropriate inference.

If you are interested, there is an informative article by Brendan
Gillon on the problem in Buddhism of the knowledge of absences and the
ontological question of negative facts (absences) in the Routledge
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. This issue is clearly of importance to
Buddhism, especially those branches that take the highest goal
(paramaartha) to consist in the absence of the root causes of dukkha.
Just how does one KNOW that there is an absence of greed, hatred and
delusion within one's consciousness continuum?

> Speaking of causality is ludicrous if one is not speaking of some
> thing that is caused, unless both the cause and the thing are
> understood as being merely conventions.

I think you may be approaching the text with too much doctrinal
rigidity. You are having a difficult time breaking free of the all
the conventional ways of looking at the world. But it is precisely
that sort of rigidity to which Nagarjuna can be an antidote.

If the only way you are capable of thinking is in terms of causal
processes requiring things to be caused, then everything breaks
down. Nagarjuna shows that deftly. So you have a choice in making
adjustments. You can go the route of regarding all process as an
illusion and conclude that there is a perfectly static unified
reality in which nothing at all really happens and all distinctions
are false. This is what you get if you conclude that both causality
and uncaused spontaneous arising is being refuted.

Alternatively, you can go the route of seeing everything as process,
but a process in which there are no things (that is no selves, no
dharmas with svabhaavas) being processed. Indeed, if there were
things with rigid boundaries, there could be no causality at all.
The belief in things is incompatible with process. So if one really
believes in dynamic causal process (including karma and so forth)
and takes that very seriously, one cannot possibly take static
well-defined things seriously at all. I prefer this way of seeing
the world, but it is only a personal preference. It has worked so
well for me that, to be frank, I have never had a hankering to find
some alternative way of reading life. And I read tend to read
Nagarjuna the way I read life.

> Is experiencing emptiness anything more than just experiencing
> things as empty?

This is a bit like the problem of what some have called experiental
opacity (or referential opacity). That is, I may see a man who is in
fact the man who shot Liberty Valance without out knowing about him
*that* he is the man who shot Liberty Valance. Similarly, a person may
(and in fact does) see conditionality everywhere she looks without
knowing that it *is* conditionality. Knowledge - that is invariably a
matter of the intellect. So I would agree that one in fact sees
emptiness all the time but it is only through the intellect that one
can know that what one is seeing is emptiness. And it is, I would
suggest, the intellectual *knowing that* that is liberative.
Otherwise, if just seeing emptiness everywhere, but not knowing that
it is emptiness, were liberative, we would all be liberated the
moment we opened our eyes as newborn infants, n'est-c pas?

> Offhand, I can't think of what the Buddhist term(s) for
> "depression" would be.

Daurmanasya is the term I have most often seen translated as
depression. I am inclined to think of depression as a relatively
modern conceit. I suppose the older term, probably one that has
about the same contours as daurmanasya, would be melancholy.
Following the terminology of James Hollis, I think of melancholy as
a perfectly appropriate response to the sadness and too-badness of
the world, while depression seems to me a "clinical" condition, by
which I mean a good excuse to for pharmaceutical companies to sell
people a lot of drugs they don't really need.

> Would anybody be able to give me the geneology of the Indian
> Swastika? Is it of Buddhist origin?

I am pretty sure it is pan-Indian. The Jains used it, as did the
Hindus. As you know, the word is derived from "su + asti", meaning
"it is good" or "well-being". It is a symbol of auspiciousness and
good luck used all over India. It is also found in early Mexican and
southwestern American art. This fact led some scholar from India,
whose name I now forget, to conclude that the first American Indians
were, well, Indians. His clincher was that the etymology of
Guatamala is Gautamaalaya, home of Gautama.

> Various sites attribute the quote you ask about to Neil Gaiman,
> but phrase it thus:
>
>    "Life is a disease, sexually transmitted and invariably fatal."

Yes, that's the quote. I have never heard of Neil Gaiman, but now I
know who he is. He's the guy who said "Life is a disease, sexually
transmitted and invariably fatal." I had been thinking the source
might have been either R.D. Laing or k.d. lang. (I always get my
Scottish psychotherapists and my Alberta vegetarian lesbian country
and western singers mixed up.)

> BTW: after all the views expressed here on sex, I'm still thinking
> that it's like the "little girl who had a little curl right in the
> middle of her forehead." Some of us on this list know it as very
> very good, others know it as horrid. Just goes to show how mind
> leads us around (not just that other thing).

Since you are good at finding quotations, perhaps you can find the
source of these two quotations. "The organ most important for sexual
pleasure is the brain." And "God gave the male of the species two
organs for pleasure, the brain and the penis. Unfortunately,the good
lord gave man only enough blood to operate one at a time."

>> so I may ask you where you find a Theravadin text that supports
>> the notion that householders can attain Nibbana *in this life*.
>
> Perhaps the Satipatthana Sutta would be of interest?  The
> Satipatthana Sutta says that *any* person who correctly practices
> the four foundations of mindfulness (for as few as seven days) may
> attain the highest knowledge here and now.

One could also mention the Milinda-pa~nha, in which the good King
asks the good monk whether one must be a monk to attain the ultimate
goal. The monk responds that for every monk who attains the goal
there are thousands, nay tens of thousands, nay hundreds of
thousands of householders. This prompts the king to ask why, then,
people bother to join the bhikkhu-sangha. The monk responds, it is
because life is more easy (sukha) for a monk.

Nagasena was not alone in seeing the life of the monk as an easy
one. One of my former students, a Vietnamese monk, said that his
master, Thich Nhat Hanh, told his monks often that the Buddha had
formed a bhikkhu-sangha for people with weak wills. Such people need
an easy life with a support system and lots of rules to protect them
from themselves. The strong practitioners are the householders, he
said, for they have the strength of character to practice in the
midst of all manner of hardships and distractions.

Strange though it may seem, I have never once encountered a
Theravadin text saying that only monks can attain nibbana. But I
have had at least a dozen students earnestly tell me that this is
the Theravadin position, and that only Mahayana recognized that laity
can make the grade. Can anyone tell me where students get such
ideas? Sounds like something that found its way into a Religion 101
textbook written by some Presbyterian in Kansas City and then passed
into common "knowledge" (along with the "fact" that the Eskimos have
56 words for snow, or maybe 45 words for pie.)

>   "Try to understand the true nature of things.
>    Remember that the time of death is uncertain.
>    Think about the deeds that you do.
>    Make efforts to benefit others." - Nagarjuna

Things have no true natures, so what is there to understand?
Remember that death certainly comes in each moment.
Recall that deeds are done without doers.
Give no thought to others, and they will be benefited effortlessly.
                                     -Dayamati

> Well, perhaps we are having another nomenclature issue.  By
> "awakening from the illusion of selfhood" I mean to say
> cultivating "embodied"  wisdom of emptiness.

When I think of anaatman, I take it to mean that none of the
components of a person are entirely within our control and that
therefore - as it says in the Sutta nipaata - things do not always go
the way we would prefer. This does not only mean world events; it
also means that our bodies, minds and personalities constantly take
shapes that we would rather they not take. This observation is not
an invitation to complacency or fatalism, but it is a sober warning
that it's not as easy as one might think for anyone to change their
habits. And if one accepts that invitation, then I think one is
bound to become much less judgemental of others. And being less
judgemental opens up increasing opportunities to be more
compassionate, if only because it is difficult to have compassion
for someone for whom one has contempt.

> Because if you want anyone else to go along with it or investigate
> further, then it's useful to have something more persuasive than,
> "this is my aesthetic preference."

What I have found most persuasive during my life is the example of
other people. When I see very kind-hearted and compassionate people,
I find myself wishing to be more like them. People who can give me
excellent philosophical accounts of how and why things work as they
do have little effect on me. Examples of kindness and wisdom in
action have an enormous impact. I guess there may be others in the
world similar to myself. For us, the aesthetic preference, which is
a matter more of heart than of head, works very well. Others may
require the sort of investigation you speak of; they may need the
hard logic and such things as consistency, the things without which
many of us can do rather well.

>> Being a native speaker of English, I am having trouble with the
>> Buddhist Hybrid English expression "being on its own side".
>
> I think it means that a thing has been shown not to have an
> existence other than that that is imputed to it by its perceiver.

So it means something like independence? That is what I have always
understood emptiness to mean, on the cue given by Naagaarjuna, who
in this follows Naagasena in Milindapa~nha. Saying that nothing is
independent (or self-existent) is expressed in more poetic language
by saying that everything is empty.

> I think a lot of people are attracted to Buddhist and other
> philosophy because they think too much about things that they
> should have been taught how to feel.

I have no idea why people are attracted to Buddhism, but what you
say certainly rings true of why I was first attracted to Buddhism.
It is also why I was (and still am) attracted to Pragmatism. In both
Buddhism and Pragmatism one finds effective antidotes to the malaise
brought about by overindulgence in thinking. To be honest, however,
it was not until I worked for four years with a good Jungian
psychoanalyst that the antidote really took effect and my faculty of
feeling became as well trained as my factuly of thinking.

>> There is a well-known passage in Vimalakirti-nirde'sa to this
>> effect: "To a bodhisattva, bondage is wisdom without compassion or
>> compassion without wisdom. Liberation is wisdom with compassion."
>
> To my mind, this looks like what used to be called begging the question,
> before that phrase came to mean suggesting or provoking the question.

If what I said were offered as an argument it would be begging the
question. I do not offer it as an argument at all. I offer it simply
as evidence that there is a precedent for Buddhists thinking about
the relationship between emptiness and compassion as I do. If the
passage inspires you (as it inspires me), fine. If not, then no
doubt you will be able to find somewhere in the vast corpus of
Buddhist literature something that inspires you better.

> It seems to me to leave unclear how the bodhisattva's attitude to
> suffering may be changed by the realization that suffering is as
> illusory as anything.

Suffering is not in the least bit illusory. It is very real. It is
brought about by conditions. Those conditions can be altered,
thereby reducing the amount of suffering. Wisdom consists in knowing
that suffering can be eradicated precisely because it is empty.
Compassion consists in having the will to help change those
conditions whenever and wherever they arise.

As an aside, I have a strong hunch that people who set out to
destroy suffering by invading countries and starting major wars in
which there is a good chance that weapons of mass destruction will
eventually be deployed are suffering from a tragic feebleness of
both wisdom and compassion. I do not need to wish that such people
will go to hell, for I am confident they will bring hell to all of
us. And the suffering we all experience will not, I assure you, be
an illusion.

> But it does feel like this realization undercuts the basic
> illusion upon which our ordinary respect for things depends

I think one gets into serious difficulties when one gets into the
business of dismissing pain and suffering as illusions. That sounds
deeply un-Buddhist to me. (But that's fine; some of my best friends
are un-Buddhists.) What I find much more helpful is thinking of pain
and suffering as empty, that is, as conditioned realities that can
be changed, precisely because they are conditioned. That way of
looking at things works very well for me, but I know on the basis of
what people say to me that it does not work very well for them. I
trust those people will be able to find a way of looking at these
things that does work very well for them. I can think of no other
time during my life when it has been more urgent for people to find
ways of accepting the invitation to compassion extended by all the
world's major religions.

> You will note that I did not say "your position = hedonism" (noun)
> but rather characterized the position as merely "More hedonistic"
> (adjective) than what is to be found in the canon.

It makes no difference whether we are speaking here of nouns or
adjectives. The point, as I am sure you can figure out, is that you
misused the adjective, since there is no sense in which the view I
(or anyone else here) discussed espouses any more than traditional
Buddhism that pleasure is the only, or even the principal, value to
seek. There is nothing at all hedonistic in saying that sexuality is
not necessarily an obstacle to nirvana.

> Does virtue grow old?  Does vice become virtue once the latter is
> "outdated"?

These are not the right questions to ask. The right question to ask
is "Is sex vicious?" The answer, I think, is "Not necessarily." Some
sex is vicious, some is not. Whether anything is vicious depends
entirely on the mentality with which it is done.

> The distinction that you offer between Buddhism as a monastic
> practice and as a modern, western lay-religion is not one that I
> accept

I am not sure what it is you don't accept. Do you not accept that
there is a difference between monastic practice and lay practice?
Then you disagree with the Buddha, who has guidelines for both.

> if one is to draw up such a dichotomy, then one must give up the
> pretense of valourizing the latter with the former's conceits.

A dichotomy is the cutting of a domain of discourse into exactly two
compartments such that nothing belongs simultaneously to both. No
one, as far as I know, has drawn such a dichotomy. Quite to the
contrary, I have acknowledged that there is both monastic and lay
practice in classical Buddhism, and that there is both monastic and
lay practice in modern Asian and Western Buddhism. What I have NOT
done is to say that one practice is superior to the other. That
position, I guess, might be Dhammarati's, who seems to see celibacy
as the only legitimately Buddhist lifestyle. If that is his
position, then I disagree with it, precisely because it makes a
false dichotomy.

> Married men, living out an existence of complicity in a capitalist
> society, arming the forces of imperialism with their tax-dollars,
> growing fat on meat taken from beasts raised in industrialized
> farms, and slaughtered in mechanized stalls, but practicing
> vipassana on the weekends, may well sneer at those who walk "The
> ancient, narrow path" as "outdated" in their virtues; but such a
> prototype of "modern, western Buddhism" may not claim those same
> virtues for himself.

A fine piece of hyperbolic rhetoric. Now, if you can find any
Buddhists recommending living in complicity with capitalist economy
and growing fat on cruelly imprisoned and slaughtered animals, let
me know. I'll join you in challenging them to think a little more
deeply about the full implications of their practice. Fortunately, I
haven't known any Buddhists of the sort you describe. (Cleaving
straw men in twain is a talent of sorts, and you do it well, but I
would recommend cultivating talents for more practical pursuits.)

> I do not know of any sense in which Buddhism "as a lifestyle
> choice, taken as a compliment to conformity" qualifies as one and
> the same religion as the mendicant's methodology of
> self-liberation that goes under the same name.

What makes one a Buddhist is going for refuge to buddhahood, to
nirvana and to the virtues that characterize the community of noble
people. One can do that either as a householder or as a monk. One
can also attain nirvana either as a householder or as a monk. I know
of no Buddhist text anywhere that denies that. Do you?

> This is not to say that I am by any means a partizan of the
> sangha; I am a critic of both parties, and of the divide between
> them.

That is a good sign. I think it would be quite out of the spirit of
Buddhist teaching to be a partisan on an issue as pragmatically
trivial and inconsequential as this one. It would also be most
unfortunate, as you rightly point out, to make a dichotomy between
practitioners   on an issue as irrelevant as whether they have sexual
activity from time to time. It is good in principle to be
critical of hypocrisy, self-righteousness and contempt, whether
those vices arise in monastics or in lay people; it is less good to
imagine that people are vicious in the absence of sound evidence in
support of such a judgement.

> It seems to me that emptiness must actually make compassion, as we
> understand it, impossible

Paul Williams attributes a view very much like this to Shantideva. I
do not find that view at all convincing, but I do recognize it as
one of the many views that important Buddhists have taken. It is one
of the many philosophical positions that seems to me to have arisen
from an excess in thinking rather too literally.

> No doubt someone can point me to a text where all of this is made
> crystal clear.

There is a well-known passage in Vimalakirti-nirde'sa to this
effect: "To a bodhisattva, bondage is wisdom without compassion or
compassion without wisdom. Liberation is wisdom with compassion."
This suggests to be that the author of the text believed at least
three things: 1) it is possible to have wisdom without compassion,
2) it is possible to have compassion without wisdom, and 3) it is
possible to have both wisdom and compassion. Given these three
possibilities, the text seems to be saying that the third
possibility is better than the other two. With this I would fully
agree (perhaps because I am too foolish to be able to figure out why
emptiness should be incompatible with compassion).

> Even Nagarjunian works like the Bodhicittavivarana seem to me not
> to tackle the problem of the radical difference of the compassion
> of emptiness

Do you entertain this as a possible explanation: whoever wrote the
Bodhicittavivarana (I've never heard of this text, but I'll take
your word for it that it exists somewhere) does not tackle the
problem because it is really not a problem at all?

>It seems to me that one can 'understand' emptiness perfectly well in
>theory and even adopt this viewpoint intellectually without there
>being an impact on one's dukkha-engendering attachment to things.

Of course. There is an important progression from study of virtues to 
contemplation of them and on to their cultivation.

>On the other hand, I know people who experientially
>came to this knowledge spontaneously or out of some practice -- and
>the insight radically changed the way that they encounter things
>affectively -- a significant reduction in afflictive emotions ensued.

No doubt people have experiences that transform them forever. It is, 
however, begging the question to plead that what people experience is 
emptiness. I think it more likely that what they have experienced is 
duhkha in such a powerful way that they automatically and reflexively drop 
their attachments. I think that emptiness has very little to do with 
such experiences.

>Therefore it seems that a
>distinction must be made between a mere intellectual
>understanding/appropriation of emptiness and liberating insight into
>emptiness.  I used clumsy phrases like 'complete experience' to
>indicate the latter.   The distinction seems to map onto two of the
>three levels of wisdom discussed in the Theravadan literature:  heard
>wisdom; reasoned wisdom; and directly seen wisdom.   Perhaps you
>would not agree with this distinction or could suggest a better
>taxonomy?

I agree completely with that taxonomy, except that I call the third 
phase cultivated wisdom or embodied wisdom. It is the difference between 
seeing someone jump over a fence, knowing how to jumping over a fence 
and actually jumping over a fence oneself.

>> There is no reason why one should have total apathy towards
>> something when its lack independence is understood.
>
> My question is:  is there a reason why someone should not?

None at all. It is quite possible to have cold-hearted insight. I 
personally do not appreciate that very much, so my choice would be for 
warm-hearted insight. But surely that is just a personal preference, one 
that is independent of the natures of insight and compassion.

>> Having mettaa towards what is known as empty is not automatic,
>
> This is an interesting position.  Does it originate in some direct
> canonical evidence, some indirect canonical evidence, your own
> intuition, or some other source(s)?

In thinking about why the Ajivikas were so deprecated in Buddhist 
texts, it has seemed to me that the Ajivika position is that it does not 
matter whether one goes around slicing up bodies, since all one is doing 
is rearranging a bunch of essentially impersonal elements. At the purely 
metaphysical level, at the level of insight, Buddhists would agree. 
That is not a wrong way of seeing things. What is wrong about it, I think, 
is that it lacks compassion. The ajivikas seem to be held up as 
examples of what happens when insight is cultivated in the absence of 
compassion, which suggests to me that the two were regarded as separate.

In Buddhist meditation manuals, there are usually exercises for 
cultivating insight and others for cultivating compassion or other flavours of 
friendship (mettaa). This suggests that the two are regarded as 
separate. If we can take an analogy, there is no doubt that muscular strength 
and endurance helps one to cultivate cardiovascular fitness, and 
cardiovascular fitness may help one build muscular strength and endurance, 
but the two are nevertheless separate in that each requires separate 
kinds of training. Similarly, insight and compassion may reinforce each 
other, but they are separate enough that each requires a special set of 
contemplative exercises.

In my own experience, I have seen quite a few wisdom-oriented 
practitioners who struck me as pretty deficient in compassion, and I have seen 
very compassionate practitioners who struck me as pretty light in 
wisdom.

So I guess I would say that it is a combination of reflection on 
Buddhist texts and reflecting on my own experiences with other people who 
practice Buddhism that has led me to say what I say about the relationship 
between compassion and wisdom.

>If I recall correctly, according to the Pali canon, the Buddha said
>that dependant origination captures his entire teaching.

He reportedly said "Who sees dependent origination sees the dharma." He 
also reportedly said that regarding every sentient being as a mother 
would regard her only child is the noblest way of living in the world. I 
suppose he meant it when he said each of these things. That's why I 
take seriously both exercises that cultivate wisdom and those that 
cultivate friendship in its three basic modes:
compassion, sympathetic joy and impartiality.

>Very good.  But what is the motivation to help others on the
>metta-optional model of understanding emptiness that you suggested
>above?

One does not like to see suffering in anyone anywhere. What more 
motivation does one need than that to seek ways to reduce it?

> So you see no possibility of contentment for the celibate then?

Of course I see a possibility of contentment for celibate people.
When people choose celibacy as a result of listening carefully to
both their bodies and their minds, then they are likely to be
contented with the choice.  But when the pressures to be celibate
come from the outside, by peer pressure, or by teachers (note how I
carefully avoid the term "idiots") telling them that they would be
much happier or closer to God or closer to nirvana if they were
celibate, then celibacy can become a terrible struggle, one that
requires quite a lot of powerful rhetoric (of the sort that one can
find, for example, in quite a few Buddhist texts).

>There are probably people who are naturally more inclined toward 
>celibacy.

No doubt about that. The people who are naturally inclined to it just 
quietly go ahead with being celibate. They need make no issue over it. 
The noise one hears over the issue of celibacy, however, comes from 
those for whom it is unnatural enough that they have to make a case for it.

>There are times in people's lives when celibacy makes sense

No doubt about that either.

>It's just the people who choose celibacy because they don't think 
>they're suffering enough whom I'd be inclined to watch out for.

It's the people who link celibacy with some other goal whom I'm 
inclined to regard with suspicion. If one wishes not to have sex and the 
various complications and responsibilities and risks that attend it, then 
celibacy makes good sense. But if someone says that being celibate will 
make one more Dharmic or will bring one closer to nirvana or 
bodhisattvahood, then I need to go look for a sleeve to laugh up. I just cannot 
see any connection at all between celibacy and the higher goals 
associated with Dharma practice. But perhaps I have been overly influenced by 
the arguments of various Vaishnavites, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and native 
Americans, whose attitudes toward sexuality and human friendship strike 
me as much more profound than the Buddha's. (Sorry, Gotama, but I can't 
agree with you about every little thing, and you DID say to examine 
these things for myself.)

>Buddha save me from the piety of the humorless.

There are many different ways of spreading the Dharma, Malcolm. One 
method is to go out and find how and why people are suffering and to try 
to find ways to help ease their pain. Another method is to find a nice 
quiet place to live a peaceful life and wait for people to come around 
to ask why they aren't satisfied with life. Yet another way is to go out 
and find how and why people are enjoying life and having fun and then 
to try to find ways to convince them they are really miserable.  
(I guess our allegedly humourless friend prefers this third method.) 
I'm pretty sure there must be several other ways, but I can't be bothered 
to think of them.

Come to think of it, Malcolm, it seems like only a few weeks ago that 
you were seen in these precincts assuring all of us that there is no 
such thing as wholesome sexuality. Are you and our Samana comrade really 
so different in your humourless outlooks?

I've got to get out of here lest I betray my secularism by cracking a 
smile.

>> Pleasure, in other words, may require epistemological and
>> psychological sophistication. Pain does not.
>
> I don't know why the inverse of the lack of insight that you cite
> in connection with displeasure that one 'mistakes' for pleasure,
> can't be equally true.

Fair enough. It's just that when I personally think of examples of
things I once mistakenly thought to be pleasures, I can think of a
great many things. When I turn my mind to trying to think of things
I mistakenly thought to be painful, I cannot think of a single
instance.

> On the other hand, one may, as I sometimes do, find that he is
> only suffering because he thinks he knows that he must be
> suffering.

Whereas I have often had to ask "Are we having fun yet?" when doing
something that is reportedly pleasurable, I have never found myself
struggling to find the pain in something I found pleasurable. This
is, no doubt, merely a matter of personal temperament. I am not
predisposed to looking for pain and other things to complain about,
but every now and again something unpleasant finds me out and makes
its presence known.

> Isn't the Buddhist analysis, in one sense, a dismantling of the
> massive structure of egoistic expectations?

I don't find the qualification "egoistic" very useful in this
context. As I see it, Buddhist mindfulness is mostly about paying
attention to which kinds of desires are realistic and which are not.

> And they are only as real as our faith in them

This has not been my experience. I have often had faith in things
that proved to be unworthy of my confidence, and I have also found
that things in which I had no faith turned out to be worthy of it.
So I am inclined to think that there can be realistic and
unrealistic faith, and that reality is robustly independent of what
I happen to think it is at any given time. (But then I was accused
by Tony Warder at my PhD defense of being a Naiyaayika with a deep
and abiding hostility toward the Buddha-dharma, so perhaps I am
disqualified by temperament and training from having anything
intelligent to say about Buddhism.)

> I would find it difficult to answer "Who am I?" but, following
> Buddha's teachings and Nagarjuna's elucidation, the "How am I?" is
> more easily answered, I think.

I have never had much difficulty is answering the question "Who am
I?" That is perhaps because I uncritically accepted the verbal
testimony of my parents when they told me that I was Richard Hayes.
The answer to the question "How am I" seems to change so often that
it is hardly worth answering at all. The only answer to that
question that remains constant is "I am mortal," and every day I
come a little closer to demonstrating that that supposition was not
entirely unreasonable. The question "Why am I?" is much too big for
a fellow like me to even try to answer.

> I can't think of a time in my life when I have had, say, a
> headache and found myself puzzling over exactly how I knew that I
> had a headache. Nor have I found myself wondering whether I really
> had a headache or was perhaps suffering from some delusion.

On the other hand, I have MANY times found myself wondering whether
I was enjoying something. Until I was about twenty years old, for
example, I thought I enjoyed getting drunk. Then I realized that in
fact I did not, and after that pretty well stopped drinking alcohol.
A couple of experiments with light drugs was enough to convince me
that I didn't find drug toxicity enjoyable at all, although it was
obvious from the testimony of most of my friends that I was supposed to. 
It wasn't until I hit the age of thirty that I discovered that I
really hated parties and being with more than about three other
carefully chosen people at the same time. The constant discovery
that something I had once believed was fun was in fact not much fun
at all convinced me that pleasure is much more likely to be
confusing and delusion-producing than pain. (To this very day, I
still labour under the delusion that eating really hot chilis is
fun. A recently purchased bottle of a sauce called Ultimate
Insanity, which claims to be the hottest sauce in the universe, has
almost disabused me of the fantasy that being in intense pain all
the way from the lips to the anus is a source of unalloyed bliss.)
Pleasure, in other words, may require epistemological and
psychological sophistication. Pain does not.

>> What DOES involve a bit of mystery is why, when it is so obvious
>> what should be done to gain relief, I lack the will to do it. What
>> puzzles me is not the nature of things, but how to overcome akrasia.
>> But even this puzzle does not detain me for long. I reckon either I
>> will overcome it someday, or I won't.

Shortly after writing that, I stumbled by chance upon the following
paragraph in an excellent article by Lee Yearley called "Virtues in
Christian and Buddhist Traditions" in Daniel Goleman's Healing
Emotions. Writing about the seven deadly sins as discussed by
Aquinas, Yearley says this about sloth (or, as he calls it, apathy):

begin{quote}
 It is a failure to pursue the goals that you really want to pursue,
 a kind of lassitude about seeking the most important things that you
 want. This vice's character is, I believe, very hard to understand,
 but I see it in myself and others all the time. That is, you love
 something good but just cannot bring yourself to do what is
 necessary to obtain it---for instance, to practice meditation
 consistently or to write the book that you want to write. Spiritual
 apathy is also a very good example of the way some vices (as well as
 virtues) can lie so deep within a person that they are never
 manifested clearly. That is, people who suffer from spiritual apathy
 may be very active, but their frantic activity covers up the fact
 that they cannot pursue the goals they most want to obtain.
end{quote}

The more of life I have experienced, the more I have come to
appreciate how very insightful the Stoics and medieval Christians
were in their discussion of emotional health and disease. In
contrast, the incessantly tedious obsession with the issue of
non-self and emptiness that one so often finds in Indian Buddhist
literature seems to have cut the Buddhists (and especially the
Madhamikas) off at the pass and condemned them to twiddling around
with trivialities and red herrings. (God, I love to mix metaphors!)

>> I very rarely feel any envy in my heart, but
>> when I do feel it, it is for those who can be credulous and naive.

For example, I almost felt a twinge of envy for the life of a
Chinese hermit when I read these beautiful lines:

        Look for the real and it becomes more distant
        try to end delusions and they just increase
        followers of the Way have a place that stays serene
        when the moon is in the sky its reflection is in the waves

        Work with no mind and all work stops
        no more passion or sorrow
        but don't think no mind means you're done
        the thought of no-mind still remains

        Not one care in mind all year
        I find joy every day in my hut
        and after a meal and a pot of strong tea
        I sit on a rock by a pond and count fish

        (The Zen Works of Stonehouse, translated by Red Pine)


> I have to confess that I actually do often find that even what appear to
> be physical pains, and certainly most of the mental ones, arise precisely
> from certainties that, be they true or false, yield to analysis, and so
> are subject to adjustment.

Fascinating. It just goes to show you how much people differ from one
another.

> But in my case at least, and perhaps for others, much of what appears to
> be suffering turns out not to be when taken apart, turns out, in fact,
> to arise from a kind of dogma: 'I know that it hurts to lose so and so
> and therefore I am suffering', and so on.

Is it dogmatic to notice that not getting what one wants is dukkha? 
That seems so basic and uncontroversial as to require no analysis at all.

> Richard Hayes' point, so far as I can tell, is that one need not
> walk that way (one needn't know how one knows the nature of
> suffering in order to know the nature of suffering).

Yes, that is exactly my point. I can't think of a time in my life
when I have had, say, a headache and found myself puzzling over
exactly how I knew that I had a headache. Nor have I found myself
wondering whether I really had a headache or was perhaps suffering
from some delusion. Nor have I wrung my hands and wondered whether I
was perhaps just being dogmatic in thinking that I was in pain. I
would have to say the same thing about such psychological aches and
pains as grief, sadness and being terrified of George W. Bush. None
of these are issues that require much epistemology or metaphysics or
any other sort of philosophical sophistication.

Almost every bit as obvious to me as the very fact that I am in pain
is what I would probably have to do to get relief. Rarely is this
any mystery.

What DOES involve a bit of mystery is why, when it is so obvious
what should be done to gain relief, I lack the will to do it. What
puzzles me is not the nature of things, but how to overcome akrasia.
But even this puzzle does not detain me for long. I reckon either I
will overcome it someday, or I won't.

> In my own experience, the ambition to provide ironclad criteria
> for knowing that one knows that one knows that one knows, etc., is
> typically accompanied/fueled by a very powerful fear of betrayal.

I quite agree with this observation. (You didn't really think I
would let you down on this one, did you, Richard? After all we've
been through?)

> I hardly wish to make light of such fear

Here we must part company. I wish to make light of fear. But I lack
the will, especially when the fears are my own. So I practise by
making light of others' fears, hoping that eventually I'll work up
to the heroic feat of making light of my own. I fear I may never
succeed.

> of course, one doesn't want to be credulous/naive, etc.

I disagree about this. I very rarely feel any envy in my heart, but
when I do feel it, is is for those who can be credulous and naive.
That, it seems to me, is a gift. The fact that some people can be
naive without even trying is almost enough to make me believe they
are blessed by God.

> But I haven't yet found an epistemology that successfully
> insulates from betrayal

Nor will you, I bet. The longing for certainty (nis'caya) is
probably one of those attachments that is best left behind. I think
Dharmakiirti did his very best to find ways to achieve it, but he
failed. And the result of his failure turned out not to be a
disaster at all for much of anyone.

> If you mean concrete, i.e. textual, there are all kinds of places
> where the Buddha references all kinds of details from the ritual
> life of the vedic priests.

I know there are places where Vedic priests are mocked and
ridiculed, but I would like to see textual references showing that
the Buddha knows details of ritual actions that could be known only
if he studied Vedic texts. This, of course, would require supplying
the passages from the Samhitas, Braahma.nas and Aara.nyakas that the
Buddha is accurately citing.

> However, even if the Buddha did not know the Vedas by heart, his
> knowledge of them still would have been non-trivial

That depends entirely on what you mean by trivial. Of course you
could use the word in such a way that your claim would be true by
definition (or, as the saying goes, trivially true).

> I think, unlike you, that it is reasonable to infer that Buddha's
> knowledge of Vedic culture and practices fairly deep.

That depends entirely on what you mean by deep. Deep enough to
trivialize them?

> Also I think it is unfair to characterize the Buddha as hostile to
> Brahamins

I do not think any claim has been made that the Buddha was hostile
to anyone. The claim was made that he mocked and ridiculed the
Brahmins. He called their beliefs and customs laughable (hassa) and
empty (tuccha), suggested that they were greedy charlatans who had
duped the public into paying them money so that they could have
lavish lifestyles and attract sexy women, and stated in no uncertain
terms that bhikkhus were more worthy of respect than
mantra-muttering priests (this of course was before Buddhist monks
themselves became mantra-muttering priests).

> there are at least two places I can think of where the Buddha
> favorouable encourages people to maintain their ancestral shrines,
> for example the Vajjians.

This by you betokens that the Buddha had a profound command of the
Vedas?

> Being from the noble caste, given that the ritual life of nobles and
> preists were inextricably bound up with each other, given that elswhere
> in the suttas the Buddha mentions the gayatri mantra by name [as the
> nobelest of mantras, but I totally forget where], I think it is fair to
> assume that Buddha's knowledge of the Vedas would have been non-trivial,
> unlike your portrayel below.

I ask for concrete evidence and all you can provide is a series of
assumptions based on the way Indian society was about 1000 years
later. The only evidence I have seen of the Buddha's knowledge of
the Vedas is that he knew just enough to poke fun at them and
trivialize them, and the people who studied and valued them. It
takes very little knowledge or understanding (or even wisdom) to
tear other people's religion down.

It is worth bearing in mind, I think, that Buddhist texts are meant
to be polemical. They are meant to show that the Buddha and his
serious followers were much more clever and had much more integrity
than the Brahmins. They were meant to show that the TRUE Brahmins
were the bhikkhus. Naturally, it is difficult to pull off a
triumphalist agenda like that without making the Buddha out to be
profoundly knowledgeable about the things he was caricaturing. But
what needs to be asked, I think, is just how much credence can one
give to this sort of propaganda. Using it as inspiration is one
thing, but naively using it as historical evidence is quite risky.

> Given that huge numbers of Brahmins who became monks, it is highly
> unlikely that Buddha was not at least familiar with and had some
> knowledge of Sanskrit as it existed at that time.

I grant you that when the Buddha heard Sanskrit, he probably knew
that it was Sanskrit rather than the quacking of ducks. He no doubt
knew something about Sanskrit, in about the same way that many
people nowadays know something about Latin. But I see no evidence
that he knew any more than that. On the basis of the evidence we
have, the only reasonable thing we can possibly say is that we cannot
know whether or to what extent the Buddha knew Sanskrit. But there
is no harm in not knowing such a thing, because it doesn't make any
difference whatsoever to anything practical.

Apropos the recent discussion of whether the goal of practice is
awakening (anuttaraa samyak-sambodhi) or nirvaa.na, here is an
interesting statement from Kamalas'iila's Bhaavanaa-krama.

s'amathavipas'yanaabhyaam samastavastuparyantaadhigamo bhavati. tena
ca aavara.naprahaa.nalak.sa.naa kaaryaparini.spattir avaapyate. tad
eva ca buddhatvam.

By means of serenity and insight there arises a definitive
understanding of all things. And by means of this understanding, one
attains the completion of what must be done, which is characterised
as the abandoning of the obstacles. And that itself is buddhahood.

The obstacles (aavara.na) to be abandoned, of course, are our old
friends the afflictions (kles'a). So buddhahood is here defined as
nothing but abandoning the kles'as (kles'a-prahaa.na), which amounts
to the same thing as kilesa-nirodha, otherwise known as nirvaa.na.
In short, Buddhahood is equivalent to nirvana. The instrument by
which one attains nirvana/buddhahood is definitive understanding
(rather like the notion of enlightenment, one could say), the cause
of which is a combination of serenity (s'amatha or dhyaana) and
insight (vipas'yanaa or praj~naa). So says Kamalas'iila anyway, on
his work later elaborations of the incremental path was based. He
quotes numerous Mahaayaana suutras to support his claim. (He could
just as well have quoted a raft of Pali suttas, but for some reason
chose not to.)

While we are in the business of clarifying terms (thanks to Dan
Lusthaus for his useful leads), I have a question concerning the
classifications of worldly (lokiya) and supramundane (lokuttara)
wisdom.

According to Ven. Henepola Gunaratana (The Path of Serenity and
Insight, p. 145), wisdom is called worldly when its principal
subject-matter is the five aggregates.  When one is attending to the
five aggregates and noting that they are not self (anatta), not
permanent (anicca) and troublesome (dukkha), then that penetrative
insight is known as vipassanaa. And vipassanaa is classified as
worldly wisdom (lokiya pa~n~naa). When, however, one turns to
investigating the four noble truths and to nibbaana, then one's
wisdom is lokuttara (supramundane) in the sense that it rises to a
higher plan than that of ordinary people (lokaa uttarati).
Vipassanaa leads to insight, but insight does not necessarily to
liberation. Only by contemplating the four truths can one attain to
nibbaana, and so only this latter sort of contemplation is
lokuttara.

What is the difference between attending to the five aggregates and
attending to the four noble truths? One possible distinction is that
the former is tending to particular instances of pain, while the
latter is knowledge of something universal rather than merely
particular. Attending to, say, the cramp in one's leg is awareness
of pain in one of the aggregates and thus could constitute
vipassanaa, while attending to the first noble truth is recognizing
that no matter where one goes and no matter what one achieves in the
universe, it will prove in the end to be unsatisfactory. This
universal knowledge rises to a higher plane than the knowledge of
particulars. When one sees that dukkha is ultimately unavoidable,
then one loses interest in things. And it is this loss of interest
that leads eventually to the cessation of future becoming
(bhava-nirodha) called nibbaana.

To return for just a moment to Dharmakiirti, could it be that when
he says that the yogi is one who sees everything (sarva-dars'in),
that is, who experiences (as opposed to merely figuring out or
deducing) the fact that, say, everything is ultimately
unsatisfactory, he is noting that the yogi's experience is richer
than ordinary knowledge in that it is universal and rises above the
particularity of the pain that one is aware of here and now? If so,
then Dharmakiirti seems to be in fundamental agreement with
Buddhaghoas (as reported by Gunaratana), for the claim would be that
it is knowledge of the universality of dukhha, rather than knowledge
of particular instances of it, that give rise to becoming
dispassionate enough to let go. Dharmakiirti can thus make fun of
those who believe in a God who allegedly knows everything without
being inconsistent in saying that a yogi is one who knows about
everything that it is dukkha, even though he does not know
everything about everything. (If one knows about everything that it
is dukkha, then one need not know anything else about anything.)

> In other words, was there any Buddhist teacher or school in
> India asserting a conventional truth which does not conceal the
> ultimate, or something concealing the ultimate which is not a
> conventional truth?

To the best of my knowledge, the majority of abhidharma schools did
not hold the view that conventional truth conceals anything. It is
simply a way of describing things in ordinary language that people
will readily understand, because it uses well-established
conventions of speech. In the Majjhima-nikaaya in various places,
the Buddha reportedly said that he used conventional language,
talking about people and horses and so forth, so that people could
readily understand him. It would be rather odd to say that when he
was speaking about conventional realities such as people, he was
unable to perecive or be aware of the things that lead to the
ultimate goal (parmaartha), namely dharmas. What he said about
himself was that he could use ordinary language without being
deceived by it. Presumably the same would be true of any
stream-entrant, since one of the marks of a stream-entrant is that
she takes off her belief (d.r.s.ti) that compound objects (kaaya)
are real (sat) before stepping into the stream. (Never enter a
stream wearing your belief that a compound and conventional self is
real.)

As I see it, the phenomenon of using conventional language but not
being deceived by it is very familiar to all of us. Most of us
speak, for example, of the sun rising, but we know very well that
nothing of the sort is going on. We may also talk about the four
corners of the earth, never losing sight of the fact that spheres
lack corners. So why could a good abhidharmika not talk about
himself without losing track of the fact that he has no self to talk
about? Seems quite easy to me. No need to talk of concealment.

As far as I know, S'aantideva's claim (in the wisdom chapter of the
Bodhicaryaavataara) that one can see either conventional realities
or ultimate realities but never both at the same time was a novelty.
I do not know who first came up with this novel (and, if I may be
permitted to use the "b"-word again, bizarre) idea, nor do I know
how or why on earth anyone would go about defending it. I am,
however, confident that it was not universally held among Indian
Buddhists.

> At any rate, leaving the Lotus aside, what about Nagarjuna's,
> Chandrakirti's, and Shantideva's opinion of anuttaraa
> samyak-sambodhi.h?

I'm not sure. Although I have read all those people several times
over the years, I can't recall any discussions of that topic. But
that may say more about my memory than about them. That is, I myself
have very little interest in the topic, so I tend not to recall
discussions about it.

> I'm sure we can add Asanga, Dignaga, and Dharmakirti into this
> list, and it goes on and on.

About Dignaga and Dharmakirti I am in a much better position to say
something. I have at my elbow a concordance that has every
occurrence of every word occurring in every one of Dharmakiirti's
texts. The word sambodhi does not occur even once. Neither does the
word nirvana. There is one mention of janma-nirodha (cessation of
rebirth). There are many occurences of samyaj-j ~naana (correct
cognition), which he says is necessary in order to achieve success
in any human enterprise. The most important human enterprise, the
parama-artha (highest goal), is avoiding what one wants to avoid and
attaining what one wants to attain. Failure to get what what wants
and avoid what one does not want is called du.hkha.  (Dharmakiirti
obviously got all this straight out of the aagamas and nikaayas.) So
correct cognition is the only way to eliminate du.hkha. So says
Dharmakiirti. Dignaaga says even less about sambodhi or nirvana.
(Less that zero? Yes, because he doesnt even hint at it or discuss
it indirectly.)

> Are you suggesting that those who say that anuttaraa sammaa-sambodhi
> (unsurpassable supreme Awakening/Enlightenment) is the goal, and that
> nirvana is a means for attaining that goal, don't appreciate Buddhism
> properly?

Tom! You are trying to draw me into reviling the Lotus Sutra, aren't
you? Well, I would have to say that those who say that anuttaraa
sammaa-sambodhi (or anuttaraa samyak-sambodhi.h as the
Sanskrit-speaking folk are wont to call it) is the goal are teaching
something different from what Gotama Buddha is portrayed as teaching
in the Pali canon.

This, of course, is the principal polemic issue in the Lotus Sutra,
which says that all those who see nirvana as the goal and fail to
see that anuttaraa samyak-sambodhi (ASS) is actually the goal and
that nirvana is a mere illusion are settling for an inferior vehicle
(hiina-yaana). Actually, the message of the Lotus is that ASS is
innate in each of us, so it's not a goal at all. One can't have as a
goal that which one has always had. So part of what it means to
follow an inferior vehicle, according to the Lotus, is to deny that
ASS is innate as opposed to a goal to be striven for.  Those who
settle for the inferior vehicle are dismissed as insufferably
arrogant imbeciles whose vision is blighted by their overweening
pride. The Lotus Sutra has about 300 pages of vile invective against
what the authors see as false Buddhists and thus ranks as one of the
longest pieces of hate literature ever to be elevated to the status
of scripture.

My reluctance to find the Lotus Sutra inspiring is legendary and has
even earned me what some alarmists have perceived as threats to my
well-being.  Yes, I would have to say that the authors of the Lotus
Sutra did not understand Gotama's Buddhism very well at all and were
in effect inventing quite a new religion that they confusingly
called Buddhism. For the sake of some kind of terminological
clarity, I suppose we would have to make a distinction between
Gotama Buddhism and S'aakyamuni Buddhism. Some prefer one, some
prefer the other. It's nigh onto impossible to embrace both at once,
although I suppose it would be possible for someone to cultivate a
heart and mind big enough to show respect for both by reciting my
favourite mantra: "De gustibus non disputandum est.

As my pappy used to tell me "Son, if a hiina-yaana will get you to
nirvana, then you've got no need for a bigger car." But then my
pappy was a conservationist who rode a bicycle to work and, only
when absolutely necessary, drove a Nash Rambler.

> But would Dharmakiirti (or any other Buddhist) say that one can
> really, fully, thoroughly understand duhkha, its arising,
> cessation, etc but not develop this power along the way?

The short answer is no. Now brace yourself for a longer answer.

It's difficult to answer this without saying a little bit about
Dharmakiirti's epistemology. He accepted only two means of acquiring
new knowledge: direct experience and inference. Direct experience is
awareness only of particulars, and inference is awareness only of
generalities. Direct experience is vivid, while inference is vague
ambiguous. Direct experience is indisputable, while inference is
always attended by some risk. Direct experience alone can deliver
paramaartha-sat (realities pertaining to the highest goal), whereas
inference can yield only sa.mv.rtti-sat (realities of common worldly
understanding).

Dharmakiirti reduced pretty well all of Buddhism to just dependent
origination and the four noble truths.  (He was in good company;
Gotama Buddha himself said this was the only thing he had taught.)
The problem he faced was what kind of knowledge is involved in the
four noble truths. If it is direct experience, then one can be aware
only of an immediately present instance of du.hkha (say, a headache)
and its relief (say, an aspirin). Only if the four noble truths are
universal can they be of any interest, because then they can pertain
to all beings, not just to one instance of pain and its relief. But if
they are universal truths, then they can only be inferential and
therefore conventional worldly truths. But the usual notion of the
four noble truths is that they alone are connected with the ultimate
goal (parama-artha).

Dharmakiirti's creative solution to this apparent impasse was to say
that the Buddha's knowledge of the universality of du.hkha was in fact
an instance of extraordinary direct experience. He experienced all the
pain of the past, the present and the future in a single instant (that
must have been one hell of a Katzenjammer!). This experience was
possible because he was a yogi. The extraordinary experience of yogins
is not like that of ordinary people, but, like all the abhij~nas, it
is commonly experienced by yogins.

> In any case, if it's handy, I'd love to have the reference to this
> quote of Dharmakirti's

Certainment, monsieur. It's from Pramaa.navaarttika Pramaa.nasiddhi
chapter 32--35. In case you don't have your copy handy, here is the
Sanskrit, the Tibetan, the English and a little bit of commentary
(that I wrote for a graduate seminar a few years ago).

j~naanavaan m.rgyate kas'cit taduktapratipattaye
aj~nopades'akara.ne vipralambhanas'a.nkibhi.h

mi shes ston par byed pa la
'khrul par dogs ba can rnams kyis
des bshad nan tan bya ba'i phyir
shes ldan 'ga' zhig tshol bar byed

32. Those who fear disappointment in acting on the instruction of
someone who does not know seek out some knowledgeable person in
order to undertake what he says.

Commentary:
People who wish to attain heaven (svarga), final absolution (apavarga)
and the principal goals of human life (pradhaana-puru.sa-artha), says
Manorathanandin, seek out someone who has knowledge of such things in
order that they may gain access to them. Praj~naakaragupta,
anticipating Dharmakiirti's next verse, adds that it is not necessary
for a person to know everything in order to serve as an authority in
the principal goals of human life; it is sufficient that he know just
those principal things.

tasmaad anu.s.theyagata.m j~naanam asya vicaaryatam
kii.tasa.mkhyaaparij~naana.m tasya na.h kvopayujyate

de phyir de yi bsgrub bya ru
gyur pa'i ye shes rnam dpyad bya'i
'di yis srin bu'i grangs mkhyen pa
nged la 'gar yang nyer mkho med

33. Therefore, one should examine his [that is, the knowledgeable
person's] opinions about what ought to be undertaken. Of what use to
us is his thorough knowledge about the total number of maggots?

Commentary:
It is understandable that people seek out one who has expertise in
such important matters as how to become contented. There are those
like the Miimaa.msakas who make promises of contentment in an
afterlife but who can provide no evidence that this happiness will
actually come in the next life. And there are others who claim to
follow the wisdom of an authority who knows absolutely everything,
including how many insects there are in the world. But, says
Dharmakiirti, why should one be impressed by such claims of
omniscience; after all, what good can it do a human being to know the
number of maggots in the world?

In looking for advice on how to be contented in the world, one should
seek a teacher who can speak in straightforward terms about what we
ought to do and what we ought to avoid doing in order to be happy in
this world before we die. And one should be wary of anyone who talks
about matters that are irrelevant to the central issue, which is how
one must act in order to rid oneself of discontent.

heyopadeyatattvasya saabhyupaayasya vedaka.h
ya.h pramaa.nam asaav i.s.to na tu sarvasya vedaka.h

blang dang dor bya'i de nyid ni
thabs dang bcas pa rigs mdzad pa
gang de tshad ma nyid 'dod kyi
thams cad rigs mdzad ma yin no

34. He is regarded as source of knowledge who knows the truth about
what ought to be avoided and what ought to be given up along with
the method [of so doing], not he who knows everything.

Commentary:
The Buddha is called the omniscient one (sarva-j~na) not because his
followers believe that he knew absolutely everything, but because he
knew everything that matters to a human being, namely, the cause of
discontent, the origin of discontent, and the method (upaaya) that
must be used to rid oneself of discontent by eliminating its causes.
Manorathanandin suggests that discontent (du.hkha) is what ought to be
avoided; the causes of discontent (samudaaya) are what are to be given
up; the method (abhyupaaya) of achieving the cessation (nirodha) of
discontent is the Noble Path (maarga). In other words, the kind of
person one turns to as an authority is one who knows the Four Noble
Truths.

duura.m pas'yatu vaa maa vaa tattvam i.s.ta.m tu pas'yatu
pramaa.na.m duuradars'ii ced eta g.rdhraan upaasmahe

ring po mthong ba'am min yang rung
'dod pa'i de nyid mthong ba yin
gal te ring mthong tshad yin na
tshur shog bya rgod bsten par gyis

35. Whether or not one can see far away, one must be able to see the
truth that is desired. If one who is far-sighted is a source of
knowledge, then come here, let's attend to the vultures!

> What is left after the last bit of manure has been shovelled out
> had to be called something. They could have called it "stable
> floor", but they didn't, they called it "nirvana".

I like the analogy given in the Questions of Milinda. There
Naagasena says that nibbaana is not an attainment at all, since it
is nothing but getting out of trouble, such as climbing out of a pit
full of glowing embers. But to one who has been in trouble, getting
out of it feels really good and therefore feels like quite an
accomplishment. (Ask anyone who is no longer in a pit of glowing
embers.)

> There is something in me that has also resisted the term
> 'enlightenment' over the years.

It's good to know I'm not all alone in this little quirk. Moreover,
given that I always admire the clarity of your contributions, I have
to confess to being particularly pleased to share this little quirk
with someone of your calibre.

> It seems to me however, that your emphasis on nirvana may not be
> adequate either.

Let me try to be a little more clear about this. When I emphasize
nirvana, I am simply trying to make it clear that this is where
Asian Buddhist traditions (or at least all the traditions I have
studied, which are but a drop in the bucket) have usually placed the
emphasis. My claim is that enlightenment talk seems, as you almost
put it, to be more driven by a fondess of mystery and an ego-based
striving for gradiose achievements than by a familiarity with
Buddhist traditions. Buddhists have traditionally emphasized nirvana
as the final goal (paramaartha), although some have viewed nirvana
somewhat differently than others.

Now, if I may go into confession mode for a moment, while I think
that nirvana is more more clearly defined than enlightenment and is
the goal of Buddhism, I personally no more believe that nirvana is
possible than I think that enlightenment is possible. I think of
nirvana as being an ideal, a limiting case, that can be headed
towards but can never be reached. My favourite analogy is that of
running a race. The goal in running is to get from one place to
another in the shortest possible time. The limiting case, of course,
is zero time. So one might say that a runner is striving to reach
the goal of arriving at the finish line in no time flat. The closer
she gets to getting there in no time flat, the better she is as a
runner. Similarly, the goal of Buddhism is to have no passions, not
only not to have any actively operating but not even to have any
further potential for passions. I just don't think this is possible.
But I still think this is the direction in which I prefer to head,
so I take nirvana as the goal that I am striving to reach, despite
being quite convinced I will never get even close to it. But the
closer I get, the better off I am.

> I prefer more what I recall you said in some other recent posts
> where the emphasis was on the practice of virtues-- the effort
> to lessen one's suffering and perhaps realize some perfections
> by practice.

That is also what I prefer. Perhaps that is why one of my many
detractors loves to say of me that I am a mere Stoic. (I am reminded
of an observation of Cantwell Smith, who said that the surest sign
of a small mind is a fondness for using the word "mere" when
speaking of another's aspirations and achievements.)

> Many people don't like to speak in these ways because they
> perhaps evoke the moralism they feel they have left behind

To my mind, nothing about our times is more sad than the fact that
so many people don't like to think of themselves as striving to
attain virtue and to avoid vice. I suppose this tragic situation has
come about because too many people in previous generations became
rather more zealous in pointing out other people's vices than in
uprooting their own. The unfortumate combination of hypocrisy and
akrasia gave morality a bad name. I am happy to see, however, that
virtue is making a strong comeback in the works of such excellent
writers as Joel Kupperman, Martha Nussbaum and Andre
Comte-Sponville.

> The idea of buddhahood might then stand as the ultimate telos of
> such effort.  Nirvana alone seems somewhat less than this.
> What do you think?

Personally, I have never had any interest at all in the goal of
buddhahood. The world does not need more buddhas. Even the one we
had a while back has been pretty much ignored by everyone. (Even
most Buddhists blithely avoid listening to what he had to offer
them.) So I think it would not help the world at all to be just
another sage that people are too self-absorbed and narcissistic to
listen to.  What would help the world more would be to have one less
harmful being doing damage to the world by failing to live in
harmony with other sentient beings and with the natural environment.
So I would be quite content to help the world out by being a mere
arhant. Hell, I would even settle for being a mere once-returner,
that is, someone who has reached escape velocity from the
gravitational pull of self-absoprtion, doubt, and self-serving
calculations about the merits of helping others, and who also has
made some progress toward reducing the effects of craving and ill
will.

If my feeble aspirations disqualify me as a candidate for receiving
of admiration of those Buddhists whose practice is to fawn over
bodhisattvas and other mythical beasts, then I suppose I shall just
have to learn to live without their approval. (Come to think of it,
I think I have already pretty much achieved that minor goal.)

> I have heard Trungpa define omniscience as "panoramic view."

I prefer Dharmakiirti's definition of omniscience: knowing what
du.hkha is, knowing its cause, knowing that it can be eliminated,
and knowing how to eliminate it.

> Please can you tell me how you yourself define the two words
> nirvana and enlightenment?

What is this, Buddhism 101? Very well, then. I define nirvana the
way everybody else who follows Indian traditions does.
Kle'sanirodha.h bhavanirodhas'ca nirvaa.nam. Nirvana is the
elimination of kleshas. The kleshas are greed, hatred and delusion.
And nirvana is also the elimination of the two-fold desire
concerning becoming, that is, the desire to continue being born and
the desire to stop living.

Bodhi is the cessation of inverted views. The four inverted views
are 1) the belief about things that are not the self that they are
the self, 2) the belief about things that are impermanent that they
are permanent, 3) the belief about things that are ugly that they
are beautiful, and 4) and the belief about things that are sources
of discomfort that they are sources of comfort.

> Also what school of buddhism you study?

Well, let's see. I did my doctoral studies in Sanskrit and Indian
studies. I wrote my doctoral thesis on Dignaaga's epistemology and
theory of language. Before writing my thesis I studied the Pali
canon, Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga, Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakos'a,
Vasubandhu's Vij~naptimaatrataasiddhi and Candrakiirti's commentary
on Naagaarjuna's MMK.  (Except for the Pali materials, I read all
these works in both Sanskrit and Tibetan translation, along with
various commentaries.) Since then I have studied quite a few things
on my own; the authors I have liked the best have been Dogen,
Shinran and Chinul among classical authors and Geshe Rabten,
Taitetsu Unno, Ajaahn Chaa and Bhante Gunaratana. My main practice
for many years was Korean Zen, which incorporates a good deal of
Pure Land practice into it. My current practice is an
Amitabha-sadhana, although I also regularly do the four foundations
of mindfulness and mettaa-bhaavanaa. Because I am my university's
Buddhist chaplain, I strive to be an ecumenical Buddhist. And
because I am by nature a pluralist, I do not like to restrict myself
to admiring Buddhism as opposed to other religions. If you can't
find me in a Buddhist temple, try looking in at a Quaker meeting or
a Catholic church.

Now, you go decide which of your pigeon holes you want to try to
jam me into.

> It would help to make a lot of sense as some of the things that
> you have said in the last week or so seem to be of a very low
> view.

The only low practice I know of is that of going around passing
judgement on whether other people's views are high or low. It's a
practice I gave up quite some time ago, because I found it made
heart and mind feel narrow and cramped.

> I really do hope that I HAVE NOT been understanding you.

Well, if not understanding me furthers your practice, then I
heartily recommend not understanding me. If your only practice
is to exercise the heavy chip on your shoulder by picking quarrels
with university professors, then may I recommend trying to expand
your practice to include a few exercises that might improve your
character?

> As I think you are trying to say that nirvana and enlightenment
> are not at all the same thing.

Yes, that is what I am saying. I am saying that nirvana is the
elimination of the kleshas and that bodhi is the elimination of the
four false views, and that therefore bodhi is only part of what is
required to attain nirvana. I also say that nirvana is the goal and
bodhi a means of getting it. And I am saying that enlightenment is a
European idea, not a Buddhist one, and that Western Buddhists have a
tendency to import their various Western categories into Buddhism,
with the result that their appreciation of Buddhism is rather
skewed.

>  Bj Lhundrup

Please help me understand the relationship between Bruce Quarles and
Bj Lhundrup. Are you a Tibetan using a Western person's e-mail
address? Or are you one of those Westerners who tries to impress
people that you're a serious Buddhist by sitting on the floor,
eating with chopsticks, mispronouncing Asian words from languages
you don't understand and pretending to have a Tibetan monicker?
Please respond truthfully. It will help me put you into a pigeon
hole so that I don't have to take you seriously as a fellow human
being.

> While the term 'enlightenment' may be questionable, I find
> that it is somewhat widespread. What it is rendering of in a
> "Buddhist" language such as Pali, Skt., Tibetan, Chinese,
> etc., I am not certain about (more below). Any ideas?

Bodhi or sambodhi.

> Is the concern/critique/worry about the term 'enlightenment'
> something about its reifying the process here?

It has been debated since at least the time of the Kathaavatthu
whether bodhi is something attained or something lost. Those who say
it is something lost say it is the loss of delusion, a loss not
attended by any gain. The argument is that anything that can be
gained can be lost. Furthermore, the argument is that only an
absence can be unconditioned, and only an unconditioned "thing" is
not subject to decomposition and eventual loss. Therefore, bodhi
must be nothing but an absence of delusion, an absence that can
never be lost, since absences can't go away.

> I do not understand the comment expressing doubt about any claim
> about someone's reaching enlightenment and remaining in a human
> body. What would be the problem or (conceptual?) difficulty in
> that?

There were several schools of Indian philosophy who held the view
that the body is by its very nature driven by passions and that
these cannot be eradicated. (A rather similar view is held by almost
all modern psychoanalysts, who argue that the body is the
repository of the successful survival strategies of countless
generations of ancestors, and that these stategies have included
fear, anger, jealousy, territoriality and so forth. These drives,
they say, cannot be eradicated.) Thinkers who held this view held
that liberation (mok.sa) is therefore impossible while the body is
alive. As far as I know, no Buddhists in classical times ever held
this view, but numerous modern Buddhists, especially those trained
in (or influenced by) psychotherapuetic techniques based on depth
psychology, do hold it. I am think specifically of Jack Kornfield,
Jon Kabat-Zinn, and Stephen Batchelor. I tend to agree with them,
but only because I prefer thinking carefully to holding tenaciously
to medieval dogmas.

> Nirvana is to experience the phenomenal world at the level of
> absolute, ultimate truth (paramartha-satya), i.e. divested of
> all our preconceptions.

Apparently you have managed to avoid learning what paramaartha
means. The word means the highest (parama) goal (artha) and refers
only to nirvana, the ultimate goal of Buddhist practice. So to be
oriented in the direction of nirvana is to be experiencing the world
with the ultimate goal (parama-artha) in mind. (Forget the word
"absolute"; it's a snare and a delusion.) One can do this ONLY if
one has at least one preconception, namely, the preconception that
nirvana is worth striving for. So please don't divest yourself of
ALL preconceptions, or you'll end up being as worthless as an old
pocket watch without a mainspring.

> But wouldn't the cessation of dukkha and rebirth entail not
> striving for anything, including nirvana?

One strives for that which one does not yet have. When one does not
yet have nirvana, one strives for it. Only when one reaches the goal
(or decides the goal is not worth the effort) does one stop
striving.

>Some good points have been made in the last few days
>but still enlightenment is what practitioners are
>working for.

I don't think you have been paying attention, Bruce. What a good many 
people in Buddhism are striving for, eventually (maybe VERY eventually 
for some), is nirvana, which is the cessation of dukkha and the 
cessation of rebirth. That is the ultimate goal for all Buddhists that I have 
ever read about. Enlightenment is just not part of the deal for most 
traditions of Buddhism. Perhaps only in the West, a place well known for 
its tendency to persist in stubborn delusory states, has enlightenment 
been seen by anyone as the goal (whether that goal be seen as remote or 
near at hand). So work on breaking the nasty habit of speaking of 
enlightenment, and try to get into the habit of thinking nirvana.

>I hardly know Sanskrit or Tibetan, but I thought that the Sanskrit
>"bodhi" or the Tibetan "rtogs ldan" could fairly be translated as
>enlightened.

Bodhi refers to the act of waking up, as from a dream or a stupor (or 
perhaps even from a stupa). Rtogs ldan means possessing understanding. 
Within Buddhism there has long been a controversy as to whether bodhi is 
something positive or simply the removal of something negative, such as 
delusion. I prefer the latter, but I think I'm in the minority. But 
being in the minority has never prevented me from being loud, rude and 
abruptly dismissive of those who dare to disagree with me.

>True enough, but there are also positive descriptions of attainment 
>such as the 37 limbs of enlightenment. (There's that word again.)

Quite a few of those "positive" attainments are in fact described 
negatively. Emotional and intellectual flexibility, for example, is 
described as the absence of rigidity. Kindness is described as the absence of 
cruelty. Love is described as the absence of hatred and anger. Wisdom 
itselt is often described as the absence of doubt and confusion.

>But if any thought of I occurred to a person, sach as either I have or
>have not attained perfection, that person whould not be enlightened. The
>thought of "I" is precisely what does not occur to the enlightened
>person.

I wouldn't know what does or does not occur to other persons. It's all 
I can do to keep track of the thoughts that occur to me.

>Thanks for taking the time to respond to my post.

I didn't actually take the time. I just used it and left it there for 
someone else to use someday.

> For instance I do agree that right-view is transcendetal
> insight, and that the Ariyan in Ariyan eighfold path has the
> same connotation as it does in Ariyasangha. The Dhamma is
> transcendental and it is easy to forget that.

I find it very easy to forget something that makes no sense to me.
I'm afraid that I have never been able to make much sense of the
notion that the Dhamma is transcendental, not because the word
"transcendental" is meaningless, but because all the meanings I know
for it are untrue when predicated of Dhamma.

Let me rehearse what I know to be meanings of transcendental. In
some contexts, it means beyond experience. That would be a very odd
thing to say of something that is described as "ehipassaka" (come
and experience it). In other contexts, transcendental means beyond
understanding. That would be a strange thing to say of something
that is described as veditabbo vi~n~nuhi (to be understood by the
wise).

For Aristotle, of course, certain predicates were called
transcendental when they did not belong to any category and yet
could be predicated of things in other categories. (Such predicates
as 'oneness' and 'being' were called transcendental by the Stagirite.) 
I doubt very much that Dhamma is transcendental in that way.

In yet other contexts, such as medieval Christian theology,
transcendental means not just superior to all things but incomparably
superior--incomparably because of an entirely different order of
things. In that context it is an attribute of God and only God. 

(I suspect that Western Buddhists, such as Sangharakshita, who have
definitively banished God from their thought, crave something in every
way Godlike to replace Her, and so they make the Dhamma transcendental
in all the ways the scholastic Christians used to make God
transcendental.  But I digress into psychological speculation.)

> The author ("A reader from the United States")of those
> two Amazon reviews of Masefield's work is an
> unfortunately well-known, self-taught 'translator'

This is no doubt interesting, but the epistemologist in me can't
help asking "How do you know all this?" I might also ask what
difference it makes whether a person is self-taught. (As I recall,
Mr Gotama was mostly a self-taught Tathaagata.)

> Be careful of whose word you take at being an authority on
> Buddhism.

Good advice to be sure. Because I take it to heart, I must also be
careful of whose word I take as authoritative on charlatans.

> There are some awfully prolific disinformationalists out in the
> world, operating on bizarre and mostly hidden agendas which one
> can barely conceive.

This is probably true enough. (After all, we seem to have several of
them in the White House, running our country into the ground.)
Still, if one is going to make claims about the credibility of
others, one should make those claims credible by supplying some kind
of evidence so that others do not simply have to take your word for
the calumnious things you profess.

> I am quite surprised to hear words like best and worst used at
> all to describe religious belief and practice.

Then almost all the religious literature of the world must surprise
and shock you. It must leave you reeling in amazement to hear the
Buddha's awakening described as anuttara (unbettered), or to hear
him described as the best of all bipeds, or to hear the dharma
itself described as lokottara (better than worldly). It is difficult
of me to think of examples of religious systems that describe
themselves merely as pretty good. They all claim to be the best.
Even pluralistic neo-Vedanta tends to see itself as the best of all
the pluralistic paths.

> This exchange surely constitutes an argument against the
> overreliance on terms like Mahayana and Hinayana, particularly
> for polemical purposes.

Precisely my point. All that differs is our rhetoric style. I like
being ironic, you like to preach.

> The deliberate malice of the religious opponent is surely an
> illusion that arises from the clinging to views.

I am shocked and suprised to hear anyone describing another's
religious views and practices as an illusion.

> I think that the fact that the Hinayana school or lineage of
> Buddhism being no longer practiced since the decline of Buddhism
> in India is a strong indicator the it's views were not always
> the best or most popular.

Which interests you more: best or most popular? I am inclined to
think that there is an inverse relation between the two. That is,
the more popular a teaching is, the worse it is. So I would take
this as an argument for the position that what you call Hiinayaana
(for using which ugly pejorative term you ought to feel deeply
ashamed) Buddhism was probably the best teaching at all, because it
never sold out to the questionable tastes of the pullulating masses
of benighted fools who make up ordinary society.

> The hinayana school only exist in books now,

It never existed at all except in the minds of self-important
polemicists who wished to steer people away from anything that might
do them so good.

> But what about his statement that philosophy is restricted to the
> western tradition (Was ist das - die Philosophie) ?

For anyone who is interested, Jitendra Nath Mohanty has an excellent
discussion of the claims by Husserl and Heidegger that philosophy,
properly speaking, occurred only in the cultures that inherited
Greek influence and that we mislabel Asian (and probably also Jewish
and Muslim) thought when we call it philosophy. He also has a
discussion of Richard Rorty's misgivings about applying the word
"philosophy" to cultures outside the one where it was first used.

As Mohanty points out, all these Western thinkers who said that
philosophy is a purely Western phenomenon were not speaking out of
contempt for Asian cultural enterprises. Rather, they were saying
that cultural particularities are best understood in their own
terms, rather than by importing concepts from other cultures onto
them. So it would be as wrong-headed (according to Husserl,
Heidegger and Rorty) to look for philosophy in India, China and
Jerusalem as it would be wrong-headed to look for yogis and muktas
and zenjis in ancient Athens and medieval Paris.

If we insist (the worry goes) on seeing the Buddha as a prophet of
God, or as a saint or a rabbi or a saviour or a messiah or an
illuminati or an ascended master, then we fail to see him as a
Buddha. Similarly if we insist on seeing him as a philosopher or a
psychologist or a scientist, we fail to see him as a Buddha. And if
we see Mogallana as a martyr, rather than as a sweet-tempered old
arhant who got beaten to death by barbaric thugs, we superimpose a
category that was probably alien to Mogallana's mind. And if we see
Jesus of Nazareth as a bodhisattva or a Taoist sage, then we fail to
see him as Paul saw him, namely, as a redefined version of a christ.

This, I think, was the principal worry of Husserl, Heidegger and
Rorty, that we do violence to what is distinct in other cultures
when we pretend to understand them by imposing familiar categories
onto them and insisting on seeing others as too much like ourselves.
And Mohanty helps one understand why we need not be so worried about
speaking of the Buddha, Ak.sapada, Naagaarjuna, Confucius and
Mencius as philosophers.

I am no expert on Heidegger, but I seem to recall that he felt that
the last true philosopher in the West was Socrates. Everyone else
has been slavishly categorizing, classifying and routinizing the
original genius of that great stone mason. So for Heidegger to say
that Asia had no philosophy is simply to say that they never quite
managed to have a Socrates. When Asians got busy slavishly
categorizing, classifying and routinizing their cultural heroes,
they put them into categories other than philosopher.

It may or may not be true in Heidegger's case that his motivations
were xenophobic in nature (how can we really know another's
motivations?), but surely the concern with understanding each
culture in its own terms is not necessarily a call to xenophobia.
Indeed, it is often just the opposite of that.

The book I have been referring to is Jitendra Nath Mohanty.
Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1992. See pp.282--299

> I'm afraid I don't understand Richard Haye's remark that there are no
> enlightened persons.

I don't think Hayes [sic] said there are no enlightened persons. I
think he said that the word "enlightenment" is a chimera. What he
meant, I suspect, is that enlightenment is so poorly defined that
there is no way of knowing whether a person is enlightened or not.

Moreover, enlightenment is not a word for which I find any
equivalents in Sanskrit or Pali. I find the words commonly used in
Buddhist traditions sufficiently workable and meaningful that I see
no need to replace them with a trendy new-age word such as
"enlightenment." Please, let's leave all the talk of illuminati and
ascended masters to Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Theosophists and
Rosicrucians. (I apologize for my jarringly abrupt shift to first
person narrative.  Hayes was finding it tedious to refer to himself
in the third person.)

> I thought that the Kosha discussed the four classes of
> enlightened persons at some length.

Which Kos'a did you have in mind? The Amarakos'a? The
Abhidharmakos'a? The later has quite a detailed discussion of
the classes of aarya-pudgala. Aarya means honourable, noble or
virtuous. That is why I suggested to Professor Dean that instead of
looking for self-proclaimed enlightened people he go looking for
virtuosi, excellent people. The guidelines for identifying
virtuosity on the hoof are well limned in many a Buddhist text.

Interestingly enough, the noble people are described in most
Buddhist literature not in terms of what they have attained but in
terms of what they have lost, not of what is present in them but of
what is absent in them. The delusory notion (d.r.s.ti) that complex
beings (kaaya) are real (sat) is one thing you will find absent in a
dharmic virtuoso. Another feature you will not find in a virtuoso is
the habit of calculating the personal gain to be derived from good
character. (Buddhaghosa interprets attachment to good habits and
vows as the propensity to ask the question "What's in it for me?
What do I gain by being and doing good?")

> Perhaps Richard means that arhats are fabulous creatures, like
> the kinnaras and gandharvas.

Well, now that you mention it, I doubt very much that anyone has
ever actually been an arhant, for I doubt that anyone has completely
shed lust, anger, pride and the various other vices that an arhant
is said to have eliminated from his consciousness (and an arhatii
from hers). Moreover, I think it may be dangerous even to believe
that one has completely eliminated all vices from one's own
mentality.  Herein lies the snare of most religions, not just
Buddhism. The ideals they give us to pursue make us better men and
women if we pursue them. But if we believe we have attained those
ideals, we quickly become monsters.

> Or perhaps my too literal mind does not understand Richard's
> sense of humor.

In this case your mind was not literal enough. You would be better
off understanding Buddhist categories in their own terms, rather
than imposing 18th century European categories such as enlightenment
onto them.

As for my alleged sense of humour, it is, I suppose alive and well,
as evidenced by the fact that I advocate laughing at George W. Bush
rather than applying the one-bullet solution that his advisors
recommend for his daddy's nemesis. Yes, these times require humour
in abundance, for without it we quickly descend into the hell of
believing in our own worthiness---and the unworthiness of others.

> On another topic, emptiness is sometimes compared to a city of
> gandarvas. Can someone explain the sense of this analogy to me?

The term 'City of Gandharvas' refers to cloud formations that appear
to be cities in the sky. But such "cities" are lacking in solid
foundation and would be impossible for us to inhabit. Similarly, if
one tries to dwell in (or on) any complex phenomenon, it will prove
to be without foundation, without substance, without value, like a
cloud city. Or like the concept of enlightenment.

> Topic:  Is metta something that truly spontaneously arises when one
> finally 'simply sees' the nature of reality as conditioned, or is
> this a narrative spin that Buddhism puts on emptiness?  Does Buddhism
> (in any of its forms) have a take on this question?

See S'aantideva's Bodhicaryaavataara. As I recall, the argument
there is that when one sees that there is no self in any phenomenon,
then one stops thinking in terms of self and other. And when one
does that, then du.hkha is simply du.hkha. It is not seen as my
du.hkha or someone else's du.hkha. It is simply du.hkha, and it is
the nature of du.hkha that one wishes to eliminate it. (In other
words, whatever one wishes to eliminate is, by its very presence,
some kind of du.hkha.) Karu.naa is defined as the action of working
to eliminate affliction (s'oka, du.hkha). So when one sees that the
very nature of something is painful, and when one does not think of
the pain as belonging to oneself or to others but just gets to work
eliminating its root causes, then one's insight has manifested
itself automatically as compassion. (I realize I was asked about
mettaa, not karu.naa, but bear in mind that karu.naa is nothing but
mettaa in the face of affliction, just as muditaa is mettaa in th
face of good fortune.)

> B)  Metta spontaneously arises when one experiences emptiness
> fully, regardless of historical narratives.  If you haven't
> experienced metta, you haven't completely gotten to the truth of
> emptiness yet.

> My intuitions are:
> 1) Buddhism would claim POSITION B;

Perhaps more precisely, if one is not yet experiencing unlimited
mettaa (after all, EVERYONE experiences some degree of mettaa
towards someone, even if only to the person who feeds him), then
one has not fully grasped the universality of aniccataa, anatta and
dukkha.

> This is a very interesting point. In scriptures and history,
> we're very quick to find and admire enlightened individuals.

Just who do you mean by "we"? (Do you recall the story about the
Lone Ranger and Tonto out riding on the west Texas plains? The Lone
Ranger suddenly spotted a line of Comanche warriors on the horizon.
Before long he saw that he and Tonto were surrounded by Comanches.
So the Lone Ranger says to Tonto "We're surrounded by Indian! We're
in big trouble, Tonto." And Tonto said "What do you mean `we', white
man?" But I digress.)

Seriously, just who are these people who admire enlightened
individuals, whether in real life or in scriptures on in comic
books? I know I am not not alone in thinking the word
"enlightenment"  is just about perfectly devoid of any meaning
whatsoever, unless the context is a store for lamps and light bulbs.

The kind of people I do admire, quite readily when I can find them,
are virtuous people, people who excel at being human beings, people
endowed with kindness, generosity, thoughtfulness of others,
humility, good senses of humour, good judgement and that sort of
thing. In fact, I quite like the list of ten virtues that the Buddha
came up with as the marks of an awakened human being: discrimination,
courage, concentration, good memory, inner joy, enthusiasm,
intellectual and emotional flexibility, equanimity, trust, and the
resolve to cultivate wholesome mental states and to eliminate
unwholesome mental states.

I also find helpful Andre Comte-Sponville's discussion of eighteen
virtues in his Small Treatise on the Great Virtues:
politeness, fidelity, prudence, temperance, courage, justice,
generosity, compassion, mercy, gratitude, humility, simplicity,
tolerance, purity, gentleness, good faith, humour and love. Both a
study of Buddhist texts and a familiarity with seasoned Buddhist
practitioners will show that these virtues are as highly prized
among traditional Buddhists as they are by the modern French
philosopher.

> You could create such a list in at least three ways: individuals
> who claim to be enlightened, individuals who are claimed by
> others to be enlightened, individuals whose position within an
> organization suggest they may be enlightened.

Anyone who claims to be enlightened is probably too lacking in
humility and good judgement of character to attract my attention. 
(A study of virtue is invariably an exercise in seeing just how short
of the ideal standards we fall. So my minimum expectation of someone
worth listening to is that he or she know that enlightenment, or
whatever you wish to call the virtues collectively, is still a
remote goal.)

Claims by people that others are enlightened are only as good as the
good judgement of the people making the claims. Generally I have
found that people who think that are people have attained or
closely approached perfection are so lacking in critical judgement
that their claims are next to worthless.

Anyone who has a prominent place in an organization, especially a
religious order that peddles the idea of enlightenment, is ipso
facto lacking in enlightenment. Wise men and women avoid such
organizations like the plague. And so should you, good sir.

So I'd say you're off to a very bad start if you begin your search
in the way you suggest. Please go back to Go and begin anew.

> Tibetans, however, will gladly point you to numerous teachers as
> enlightened.

Many Tibetans would also be happy to sell you a horse that can run
as fast as the wind, a gem that cures fevers and infertility, or a
cow whose milk makes your every wish come true. When buying anything
from a Tibetan peddlar, the operative dictum is "Caveat emptor."

> And the inner fireworks one can experience from Wong Kur goes a
> long way to suggesting as much.

Oddly enough, I have never seen inner fireworks mentioned as one of
the cardinal virtues, or even one of the minor virtues. This could
very well be because no causal link between peak experiences and good
character has ever been established. And since Buddhism is about
cultivating good character rather than in having peak experiences, one
finds remearkably little reference to inner fireworks in the teachings
of Buddhists.

> If the original question was seeking details of the process of
> enlightenment *in fact*, and not in scriptural doctrine, I
> suggest inquiry among the allegedly enlightened is as valid as
> scriptural inquiry.

You started off on the wrong foot and now you continue to hobble
along, sadly crippled by your own feeble assumptions. Why not begin
like this: ask yourself which characteristics in a person make you
feel the person is really very good at being human. Ask yourself
which characteristics diminish another person in your esteem. More
than your own judgement in these matters, you need nothing at all,
except perhaps for people in your life who are exemplars of humanity
at its very best. If you know a few such people, everything else
will pretty well take care of itself. This is why the Buddha told
the Kalaamas "When you yourself know what is praised by good and
worthy people, then you will know to avoid what is harmful to
yourself and others, and you will know what is beneficial to
yourself and others."

> Los Angeles

I'm glad you mentioned the angels. Angels are often exemplars of
virtue, so I think a very promising start would be to meet a few of
them, study their conduct and imitate it as best you can. That would
do you much more good in the long run than sniffing around the feet of
people who are claimed by themselves or by others or by organizational
position to be enlightened. Sharpen up your methodology, my boy, and
good results are bound to follow.

> Does anyone know the symbolic significance of the fans used in
> Theravadan Buddhist ritual. I notice that Laotian monks
> occasionally speak from "behind" one of the fans during
> ceremonies.

Thus have I heard from more than one Theravadin Buddhist monk. When
expounding the Dhamma, it is important that the words and meaning of
the teaching are by far the most important factor. The teacher's
"charisma" should be very far in the background. Just to assure that
no one is swayed by a monk's handsome face or pleasant-sounding
voice, monks are encouraged to speak from behind a fan in order to
mute their personal charisma. (This also helps protect the monk, of
course, from cultivating unwholesome pride about being a popular
teacher.)

It is for similar reasons, I was told, that Theravadin monks often
chant off-key in monotonous voices; this reduces the risk that
someone will be attracted to the Dhamma just because someone has a
beautiful voice.

> I've always wondered at the inferior haberdashery (not to
> mention, in a few cases, personal standards of cleanliness) of
> religious scholars

Do you mean religious scholars or scholars of religion? As far as I
can tell, most religious scholars study things like quantum
mechanics and dress very neatly. Most scholars of religion, on the
other hand, are atheistic neo-Freudians, pseudo-Marxists,
quasi-Existentialists or crypto-Derrididdlians and feel a deeply
neurotic existential need to pretend to feign authenticity by
showing their solidarity with the pullulating masses. It is de
rigeur for a professor of comparative religions to look as if he
spent the night sleeping on a bench in a park or in a kennel for
impounded dogs.

At my university, most professors wear causal clothing. The one
exception to that is the Faculty of Religious Studies, where nearly
everyone (including the women) wears a necktie and tuxedo jacket.
The one exception to that is myself. I wear blue jeans and blue
denim shirts, because I love cotton and hemp clothing but cannot
abide synthetic fibres. And of course I would never wear wool, since
I regard the use of wool as a violation of the second precept
(stealing from sheep). My idea of dressing formally is to get
someone to iron a neat crease in my dungarees.

Perhaps a factor in my decision to move to the philosophy department
at the University of New Mexico is that it is a place where I can
wear blue denim shirts with mother-of-pearl buttons and not feel
overdressed.

> In what way is mindful and careful reflection on reality speculative?

When it involves mindfully and carefully making conjectures. To make
a conjecture mindfully is to be aware that it is only a conjecture
and that it could be overturned by further observation.

> My dictionary (Pocket Oxford) suggests that to speculate is
> indulge [sic!] in conjectural thought, talk, or writing; or to
> engage in risky financial transactions. And conjecture is the
> formation of opinion on incomplete grounds; or guessing.

Yes, it is, in other words, what Indians called anumaana
(inference). Drawing inferences can be done carefully or carelessly.
I recommend drawing them carefully. Then one is practising mindful
speculative philosophy. It is a practice with a long and respected
tradition in Asia.

> It seems to me that the practice of careful reflection on the
> nature of reality is therefore the complete opposite of
> speculation.

No, careful reflection on the nature of reality is completely
impossible without careful and mindful speculation. Without mindful
speculation, one is prone to taking every experience uncritically
and naively at face value. If one does that, then one "thinks" like
George W. Bush, the alleged president of the United States, rather
than like a Buddhist. (This is probably why George W. Bush has
declared that he would allow not any Buddhists to be appointed to
the Supreme Court. He dreads any kind of careful thinking. Finds it
too threatening.)

> I do agree that reflection on the nature of reality is
> indispensable, but lets not confuse it with guessing, or merely
> forming opinions, or to engage in risky financial transactions!

I never had these things confused. I doubt that you did either. Most
probably you were just feeling your oats and feeling a need for some
pointless debate. (This is not intended as an insult. I admire
nitpicking. It takes a lot of mindfulness to pick nit well.)

> Wisdom derived from analyzing the nature of reality is what
> Buddhism is about.

In the tradition I am most comfortable with, the purpose of effort
is not so mcuh to gain wisdom as to lose the causes of suffering. I
suppose this could be done without cultivating wisdom, but I think
wisdom the the surest route to deliverance from one's internal
afflictions (the ones that cause so many external afflictions for
the people who have to live with us).

> Sitting and meditating or pretending to meditate is not what I
> think Buddhism is trying to teach.

True, Buddhist is not teaching how to pretend to do anything at all.
It is advising us all to teach ourselves, one person at a time, how
to become free from afflictions. For some, this is best done by
thinking carefully about the world in which we live. Rarely have I
seen people who were good at this sort of thinking when they were
caught up in various kinds of panic about their vested interests. So
getting rid of panic is an important step, and that, I have found,
is best done by learning how to sit quietly and listening to the
world's various moans and groans and cries and whimpers. It's just
that one should not remain forever in quiet sitting, unless one's
only goal is to develop callouses on each buttock.

>> No amount of philosophical speculation, however much fun it
>> is, can match a day, or an hour even, of practice.

Of course if the practice one choose to pursue is one of mindful and
careful reflection on the nature of reality and what that implies
for the way one uses one's life, then philosophical speculation IS
practice. I reckon it's probably the most effective practice one can
do. Sure beats looking at a wall and sucking wind.

> I don't think so. From the Buddha onwards the idea of a creator
> god that is responsible for it all working in any way has been
> something has been rejected.

As I recall, the rejection of the idea of a creator god picked up
momentum in direct proportion to the move towards montheism among
Hindus. The early Buddhists seemed not to put much energy into the
question, except that in the canon we do find a few references to
the wrong-headedness of the view that there is but one cause (be it
issara/is'vara, brahman, purisa/puru.sa or pakati/prak.rti) for all
things. In later Buddhist tradition in India, however, people began
writing entire treatises against the doctrine that the world was
created by god and/or is supported by god. The notion, often put
forward by theists, that God works in mysterious ways, was regarded
as an especially laughable hypothesis, since it replaces the attempt
to resolve a mystery with a further mystery. Moreover, Buddhists had
a hard time figuring out what kind of comfort one could possibly get
from a doctrine that says, in effect, awful things happen to us, but
there is no way we can understand why. Even worse was the
doctrine, held by some theists, that all the pain and turmoil we
sentient beings go through is the collateral damage of God just
having fun. What seems to have taken place in India was that the
more theists attempted to salvage the idea of a creator god, the
more Buddhists punched big holes in their theology.

Come to think of it, awful things DO happen to us, but there is no
way we can understand why. The theists go that part right, I think.
Mind you, I don't think it's God's fault. I think it's just because
the universe is really, really big and we are really, really small
and of no importance whatsoever in the greater scheme of things.
It's only because we are us that we think we are somehow significant
and worthy of being protected from big things like floods, comets,
earthquakes and droughts---and from more trivial things such as
ourselves.

> When does urban legend become buddhavacana?

When it becomes useful in liberating people from their kleshas.

> And given, as Richard points out, that what we may revere as the
> 'canon' is simply hearsay (literally) that has been through an
> editorial process: where is the value in scripture?

It's a shortcut to finding the right combination of hypotheses and
pieces of advice that will help one in the task of eliminating the
kleshas. Presumably, if one reads a canon (just about any religious
canon will do) one will find more workable good advice on liberation
than if one reads nothing but, say, computer manuals, hot rod
magazines and telephone directories. Or so I have observed.

> So one is left still to wonder about the propriety of
> self-defense, mercy-killing, just war, and suchlike actions.
> Other Buddhist textual traditions preserve similar ambivalences
> on these issues. I guess there's still some tinkering to do on
> the dharma.

And what would tinkering achieve? Heaven forfend that such tinkering
would result in univocal answers on the important questions you
raise. To me the beauty of Dharma is its ambiguity on important
ethical questions. The guidelines offered in Buddhism are vague, so
that they can cover many situations while still requiring that
people are forced to think, to struggle, to learn from mistakes and
even to figure out whether specific actions really have been
mistakes after all.

What makes Dharma beautiful and useful, to my mind, is that it
offers the gift of vagueness and ambiguity, precisely the opposite
of the ugly and dangerous certainty and conviction of America's
current unelected president, and the black-hearted puppeteers who
pull his strings. Theirs is a well-tinkered world of black-and-white
moral certainty, which makes them barely distinguishable in form,
content and style from the despotic leadership of the countries they
have called the axis of evil. If American citizens could get even
half as interested in overthrowing the current American government
as they are in watching the World Series, they could usher in a new
era of peace and justice, based on the one of the best examples of
Dharma in modern times, the United States Constitution.

> A lot of energy on this list has gone into denying that there is
> anything that could be labeled Eastern or Western approaches to
> Buddhism.

That was not the issue at all. The issue, as I understood it, was
whether "East" and "West" are the best labels to use to capture some
of the broad generalizations one could make.

> But if I took ten essays written by Western academic Buddhists
> and shuffled them together with ten essays written by learned
> Geshes, I have no doubt I could determine which group to assign
> the essays to.

You should learn to doubt, sonny. A little bit of doubt never hurt
anyone, and it has saved many a fool from making rash claims. I
daresay that if two of the essays in the stack written by learned
dge-bshes were composed by Georges Dreyfus or Thubten Jinpa, you
might find it harder to distinguish them. And if you were to cast
your net a bit wider than Tibetan Buddhism and were to include Asian
Buddhists in general, you might find it difficult to distinguish
whether essays written by Bhikkhu Buddhadasa, David Kalupahana,
Keiji Nishitani or even Venerable Sheng Yen were written by Asians
or Europeans or North Americans. I think it's even possible that
some essays written by the 14th Dalai Lama might put your hypothesis
to a severe test.

> How so if there were no common attitude or theme that ran
> through Eastern and Western approaches to Buddhism?

Scholars in Islamic studies often use the designations "traditional"
and "modern" to discuss differing attitudes among Muslims. Of course
these categories, like East and West, are only heuristic, but I
find the modern vs traditional distinction a somewhat less confusing
heuristic than the threadbare East vs West distinction.

I think one could make observations about Buddhists these days
similar to those made by our colleagues in Islamic studies. Some
Buddhists are quite traditional in that they hardly ever refer to
any ideas that did not evolve within their own tradition within the
past millennium or so. These Buddhists are akin to the Osama bin
Ladens and Ayatullah Khomeinis of Islam. (Another word for this
might be "parochial" or even "fundamentalist" but "traditional" may
be less emotionally loaded.) Some of the allegedly learned dge-bshes
you have in mind might be rather like that.

Other Buddhists of our times, on the other hand, refer not only to
traditional Buddhist writings but also to a wide range of European,
North American, occasionally African and South American and often to
non-Buddhist Asian thinkers, both classical and modern. They might
be somewhat akin to the Salman Rushdies of Islam.

There might be another way to talk of the distinctions between
traditional and modern Buddhists. One could say, again
heuristically, that these days you find two kinds of Buddhists:
single enlightment and dual enlightenment. The single-enlightenment
Buddhists are those who draw only on the Buddha's enlightenment,
while dual-enlightenment Buddhists are also influenced by the values
and methods of the European enlightenment. Dual-enlightenment
Buddhists (who could also be called modern Buddhists, whether they
are Asian or from elsewhere) need not uncritically endorse all the
values of the European enlightenment, but their thinking is very
much informed by those values, even if their thinking is shaped by
attempts to criticize or refine them.

I suppose one could go further and speak of some modern Buddhists as
mutiple-enlightenment Buddhists. These would be the robust religious
pluralists among us, those who recognize that enlightenment (if one
must use that word at all) is found in all kinds of forms. As a
theoretical construct, one may find some traditional Buddhists
saying such a thing, but my impression is that in practice it is
mostly modern Buddhists who actually study and quote people from
every time and place in the history of human thought. Some are so
braod-minded that they do not even restrict themselves to human
thought. Some, I assure you, teach a form of Dharma that is strictly
for the birds.

> false dichotomies ... )hmmmmm( ... (are there "true dichotomies"?  what
> would they be?)

There are plenty of true dichotomies. Rational and irrational
numbers, numbers greater than or equal to zero and negative numbers,
vertebrate and non-vertebrate animals, people who drive Toyotas and
people who do not drive Toyotas. The number of true dichotomies is
endless, some of them useful and some not. Any time one has a
criterion that conceptually separates one set from another such that
no item in the universe of discourse belongs to both sets, then one
has a true dichotomy or what people in set theory call a partition.

In contrast to true dichotomies, one has all kinds of
pseudo-dichotomies, that is, distinctions that purport to divide the
universe neatly into two parts but in fact fail to do so. Examples
of false dichotomies, aside from East and West, abound. Friend and
foe. Peace-loving and warlike. Lovers of Freedom and Terrorists.
(Republicans, you may have noticed, tend to trade mostly in false
dichotomies. This is what distinguishes them from Intelligent
People.)

Some putative dichotomies are controversial in that some people
would say the dichotomy is true while others would disagree. Mind
and matter is a putative dichotomy about which there has been quite
a lot of controversy.

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out whether
the following dichotomy is true or false. It has been said that
there are exactly two kinds of people in the world: those who
believe there are exactly two kinds of people in the world and those
who do not.

> This preoccupation with east and west is very much a northern
> hemisphere thing btw.

More specifically, it is a European thing. It is relative to Europe that
East is East and West is West. As Pierre Trudeau used to love to point
out, from the perspective of someone in Vancouver or San Francisco, Japan
and Korea are the near west, not the far east.

For me, this entire notion of East and West fails to make any sense not
only at the absolute level, but even at the conventional level. I can
think of few commonly made distinctions that are more useless, not only
because East and West are so unnecessarily Eurocentric as geographical
terms, but because the terms are almost perfectly meaningless as cultural
designations. In an age in which just about every educated person in the
world is likely to have at least some familiarity with the thought of
Plato, Aristotle, Muhammad, Gotama Buddha, Confucius, Karl Marx, Mao
Zedong, Bertrand Russell, Nishitani Keiji, Nelson Mandela and Chief
Seattle, there is just no such thing as a typical European perspective or
a typical Asian perspective or a typical African perspective. A kid
growing up in central Kansas these days is about as likely to know who
Krishna was as she is to know who Penelope was or who Ruth was.

As a friend of mine recently pointed out, one hundred years ago people
such as William James and Swami Vivekananda had to sell cultural pluralism
to a reticent public, but now one would have to make Herculean efforts to
avoid being culturally pluralistic. But then I say all this from one of
the many North American perspectives.

>> The problem is that there is no universally accepted way of
>> quantifying what is major and what is minor.
>
> Put in those terms it is bound to be problematic.

My job is to create problems where there were none.

> How you categorize may vary but it doesn't change the actual degree of
> difference.

Part of my original point was that there is no reliable way of measuring
the actual degree of difference. The perception of difference is
contingent on one's previous experiences. 

> If you start from Sanskrit, then Pali is easier.

If you start with Sanskrit, just about everything in life seems easier in
comparison.

> Well, I have always found history more interesting than philosophy.
> Philosophy is only as good as its presuppositions, which usually seem
> rather poorly founded to me.

Surely any intellectual enterprise is only as good as its presuppositions.
This is no less true of history, linguistics, psychology and anthropology
than of philosophy. Philosophy, as I understand it, is the noble
enterprise of becoming aware of one's presuppositions, so that at least
one knows more clearly just how prejudiced one is. Needless to say,
philosophy does not have a monopoly on the enterprise of being critically
aware of one's own biases.

> Yes, indeed. And worst of all is the kind of sectarianism which
> considers itself above sectarianism.

I'd like to think that that goes without saying. It's a little difficult
for me to imagine how anyone could be so naive as to think they have
actually become non-sectarian when just about all of human history
constititutes evidence for the hypothesis that most attempts to find
common ground among disputing factions succeeds only in creating yet one
more faction with whom everyone engages in dispute. Still, despite the
rather obvious fact that no one ever completely rises above sectarianism
(just as no one ever completely eradicates all their kilesas), trying to
become less influenced by one's sectarianism (like trying to become
less influenced by one's kilesas) seems the right thing to do. But that's
just my own personal prejudice. Your prejudices may differ.

> Aug. 25 - Dharma Talk, "Bodhisattvas from Below" - Bodhisattvas try to
> save people in the Saha (real) world.

Just a tiny quibble, but doesn't Sahaloka mean the suffering world?
Surely this world is neither more nor less real than any other. That
is, it is distinguished from other worlds not by being real in
contrast to their being unreal but by its suffering in contrast to
their being happy (sukhavat).

> I'm wondering: If I go back to classical Sanskrit and manage to
> gain a decent understanding of it, how hard will it be to pick
> up "Buddhist hybrid Sanskrit" and Pali?

My own experience both in learning and in teaching these languages
indicates that a good basic knowledge of Sanskrit grammar greatly
facilitates learning both Pali and what some people call Buddhist
Hybrid Sanskrit.

All languages are difficult, because language is invariably a highly
complex phenomenon, but exactly how one language is difficult may be
very different from how another language is difficult. Sanskrit is
difficult because of all its inflections, both verbal and nominal.
If you have ever studied Greek or Latin, you'll find that Sanskrit
is just about exactly as difficult in the same ways as those two
languages are. Students and friends of mine who have started
Sanskrit after studying Latin or Greek for two or three years
usually sail through Sanskrit and become capable of reading well
within a year or two. People who have studied Russian or German
also seem to have a head start in learning Sanskrit.

Pali, on the other hand, is morphologically more simple than
Sanskrit or Latin or Greek, so it takes significantly less time to
learn the various forms of nouns and verbs. The way Pali is
difficult (for me at least) is that it tends to feel like a
relatively imprecise language, especially in contrast to Sanskrit.
The language of the canon especially has a loose, vague and
impressionistic feel about it, rather like colloquial language or
slang in contrast to the way philosophers talk, whereas the later
commentarial Pali feels more precise and formally structured, not
much different from academic Sanskrit. One finds about the same
thing true of different periods of Sanskrit. The Upanishads are
grammatically simple but maddeningly vague and murky and inchoate,
rather like the Buddha's discourses, whereas the later Sanskrit
systematizers are more highly evolved as communicators, in about the
same way that Buddhaghosa was a better communicator than the Buddha
himself.

In practical terms, I have found that students taking Sanskrit are
not able to read much more than simple and uninteresting sentences
until they have around six months of hard work and memorization
under their belts, whereas students of Pali are reading pretty
interesting and longish passages from the canon within three or four
months. Sanskrit provides a slightly better opportunity for
cultivating patience and learning to defer gratification and is
therefore spiritually better for one than Pali.

Just this morning I was reading an article about how doing
challenging mental tasks has been shown to keep the brain fit. The
article recommends doing math problems, solving crossword puzzles
and playing chess as methods of exercising the brain and retarding
the loss of memory and mental agility that naturally happens as one
ages. I would heartily recommend the study of Sanskrit as an
excellent way to keep in good mental shape. It makes demands on the
memory and on the parts of the brain involved in solving puzzles.
And nothing in the world comes even close to being more fun and
deeply satisfying than reading a well-written Sanskrit poem. You are
in for a treat, Tom. Don't wait another minute.

> I would rather say that it is naive to separate out minor dialect
> differences as if they amounted to major differences of language.

The problem is that there is no universally accepted way of
quantifying what is major and what is minor. Most judgements on
these issues end up being mostly subjective. For this reason, it has
always been notoriously difficult to set out the criteria by which
one determines whether language A is a dialect of language B or a
distinct language.

One striking example of how difficult linguistic categorization can
be that I saw recently was in a discussion of the languages of North
American native peoples. Linguists have traditionally distinguished
many families, such as the Iroquois group, the Athabaskan group, the
Algonkian group, the Uto-Aztecan group, the Tanoan gruop, the
Keresian group and so forth. They might then argue, usually without
much consensus, about whether Dene, Navajo (Dine) and Apache (Tine)
are different languages or just different dialects of a single
Athabaskan language, and similarly with plains Cree and eastern
woodlands Cree. In recent times, however, some linguists have
suggested that there are really only two language families in North
America, one of which includes all the groups named above, and the
other containing the languages of the Inuit and Aleuts. What all
this illustrates, of course, is that there is no obvious way of
deciding whether one or more things have enough in common to belong
to the same class or whether the differences warrant placing them in
separate classes. That is true at the level of talking about
language families, and I think it is just as true at the level of
talking about dialects.

For a long time I have wondered about the relationship between Pali
and Maagadha. I think I have heard that Maagadha was the language of
the Jaina aagamas, and I have also had the impression that the
Buddha (if there ever was such a person) would most probably have
spoken and communicated in Maagadha. One would therefore suppose
that the Jaina aagamas and the first Buddhist texts were delivered
in the same language. Now it seems to me (and I have to admit this
is purely subjective) that Pali is different enough from the
Maagadha of the Jaina aagamas to make them distinct languages. They
are at least different enough that I can read Pali without much
trouble, but I can barely make any sense at all of the Jaina
aagamas. For example, it feels to me as though my knowledge of
Sanskrit and Pali (both of which I have studied) helps me less with
Maagadha (which I have not studied) than French and Spanish (both of
which I have studied) helps me with Italian (which I have never
formally studied). For that reason, I have concluded that Maagadha,
the language most probably spoken by the Buddha, is different enough
from Pali to be as worth being called a different language as
Italian is worth being called a different language from Spanish.

This issue is one about which I am only mildly curious. Nothing
rides on the answer. I am not particularly concerned about whether
the Buddha actually existed, and I could not care less whether any
proposition in any of the Buddhist canons was actually spoken by the
"historical" Buddha. Perhaps for those who place more emphasis on
historicity would feel more passionate about whether Pali was really
the language of the Buddha. For most of us who have not achieved
perfect dispassion (and that would include at least an estimated ten
percent of the readers of buddha-l), our emotional investments in
sectarianism has a way of flavouring our perceptions on issues as
seemingly emotionally neutral as whether the Buddha really spoke
Pali and really spoke the verses of the Dhammapada.


> I would rather say that it is naive to separate out minor dialect
> differences as if they amounted to major differences of language.

With this I completely agree. That's why I regard it as perfectly
silly to insist that Pali is a different language from Sanskrit,
when in fact it is just a dialect with minor differences.

It is good to see us agreeing on so many things these days, in
contrast to the past, when you seemed to jump on everything I said,
no matter how trivial.

>> I think it is pretty well universally accepted that
>> Pali is a later language into which the first Buddhist texts were
>> translated.
>
> Only by those who think that American is a later language into which
> English writings have been translated.

I have known several Sri Lankans who have been confident that the
place of origin of Pali was ancient Sri Lanka. And I have read the
works of European specialists in Pali who have conjectured that the
language originated in Western India several centuries after the
time of the Buddha. I don't believe either of those is true, but I
also join with a substantial number of scholars in Europe and Japan
in thinking it is naive to say that the Buddha spoke Pali. (I'll
leave aside for now your own personal obsession with denying that
the American language is different from and obviously superior to
the relatively impoverished language spoken in parts of Great
Britain.)

> But we have discussed this at some length in the past

Really? No recuerdo.

> It used to be thought that the noun "srad is cognate with Lat.
> cors (cordis), Greek kardis and English heart.  Are there newer
> ideas about the etymology of "srad ?

I have seen none. But I am familiar enough with the Paninian
trdition. I have never seen any Indian source linking the word s'rat
[sic; the Paninians do not call it s'rad] with the meaning of heart.
For a word to be conisdered a true cognate, the usual principle is
that there must be both a phonetic congruence and a semantic
similarity. So it makes sense to link Latin centum with Sanskrit
s'ata, because both mean a hundred. But without a semantic
equivalence, it is far more speculative to link s'rat with cors and
kardis.

In any event, it is heartening to see you agreeing with
Sangharakshita for once. He makes much of s'raddhaa meaning
something like to place one's heart in a thing.

> In Pali, the language of the original Buddhist texts, the word
> usually translated as faith, confidence, or trust is saddha.

Since when did Pali become the language of the original Buddhist
texts, Sharon? I think it is pretty well universally accepted that
Pali is a later language into which the first Buddhist texts were
translated.

> Saddha literally means "to place the heart upon."

No one, beginning with Panini, knows what the word literally means.
The interpretation you give is a modern conjecture without much
philological support.

> In Pali, faith is a verb, an action, as it is also in Latin and
> Hebrew.

This is a grammarian's dogma, namely, that all words are derived
from verbal roots. Verbal roots themselves, however, exist only in
the minds of grammarians. They are purely of theoretical value.

> Faith is not a singular state that we either have or don't have,
> but is something that we do.

Perhaps you do it. I don't.

> We "faithe."

What ever happened to perfectly useful expressions such as "I have
confidence" and "I trust"? Do we really need a new verb, "to
faithe"?

> Saddha is the willingness to take the next step, to see the
> unknown as an adventure.

Here you depart from Pali and Sanskrit Buddhist commentarial
traditions. S'raddhaa is pretty universally explained as the
confidence in a body of teachings one has on the basis of past
experiences of those getting good results as a result of following
those teachings. It is far from a leap into the adventurous unknown.
Almost exactly the opposite, it is a conviction that there is no
need to diverge from well-worn paths.

> Does anyone think she stands a chance at reclaiming the word
> "faith"?

It seems a perfectly quixotic task. What's the point? The word faith
has been thoroughly hijacked by Christian theologians, to whom it
usually means the divine gift of being able to believe firmly it
that for which one has no evidence. To anyone living in a Christian
or post-Christian culture, the word "faith" resonates so strongly
with that meaning that it is almost foolhardy to try to use it in
any other sense. It would be like trying to revive the word "rape"
in the sense of "to steal". When so much of the Buddhist message is
about accepting things as they are, why not just accept that "faith"
now means to accept something as true without adequate evidential
warrant? Since s'raddhaa does not mean that at all, one can only be
misunderstood if one insists on translating it as "faith".

What I suspect we see going on in Sharon's campaign to revive the
word "faith" is another case of a Western Buddhist being pettily
hostile to Christianity. So I would be inclined to say "Give it a
rest, Sharon.  We don't need this sort of gratuitous Christianity
bashing."

> One must also remember the kind of language used by C19th bigots
> like Waddell who saw Tibetan Buddhism as a kind of demonic
> embodiment of everything they despised about the Catholic Church
> -- eg the Dalai Lama was the Lamaist Pope etc etc.

This perception, long dead among scholars of Buddhism, is still
alive and well in some unscholarly circles. There is, for example, a
booklet published by the Jehovah's Witnesses called "What Has
Religion Done for Mankind?" in which each of the world's religions
is discussed in enough detail to dismiss it as a terrible menace to
humanity. The chapter on Buddhism has information on nothing but
Tibetan Buddhism, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama is indeed
portrayed as the Pope of Buddhism, who, like his counterpart in
Rome, is allegedly a power-hungry despot wielding arbitrary
authority that crushes the spirit. I take this Jehovah's Witness
publication as a sober reminder of how scholarship can be abused,
and it often makes me wonder what things we scholars are saying in
good faith today about Buddhism will eventually be used by bigots
against Buddhists.

> Slightly different but similar is the way US "ethnic" Buddhists,
> especially of Japanese origin (Pure Land), adopted Christian
> titles and other language, perhaps as a way of gaining
> acceptance.

According to Tai Unno, this move was quite deliberate and was done
exactly for the reason you suggest, namely, to minimize the
perceptible differences between Buddhist and Christians. The
decision was made more than a century ago to refer to the American
branch of the Jodo Shinshu movement as the Buddhist Church of
America. The buildings are called churches, the ordained clergy
ministers, and higher administrators bishops. Hymns replaced chants,
organs replaced bells and wooden fish, choirs replaced silence, pews
replaced mats, sermons replaced Dharma talks, and bingo replaced
daana. The result is that one could easily attend the better part of
a Sunday morning Buddhist church service before realizing that one
was not in a Methodist church.

I have to confess, I rather enjoy going to Buddhist Church of Canada
services. It provides a welcome relief from the quaint affections
that so many North American Buddhists adopt: eating with chopsticks,
chanting in all manner of foreign languages with butchered
phonetics, taking on Asian names, wearing Asian robes, and pounding
on and blowing into assorted primitive noise-makers. I guess all
these affectations serve as useful reminders that Form is indeed
emptiness.

> But when Richard Hayes and Stephen Batchelor engage in
> constructive theology, they naturally should expect that their
> statements are ripe for historical analysis, just as certainly
> as the words of Nagarjuna or Vasubandhu. Both share a desire to
> avoid the potentially negative valences associated with the word
> "Buddhism" (negative in a world in which many people are
> "spiritual, not religious"), and yet both want to capitalize
> upon the potentially positive valences associated with the word
> "Dharma."

That may or may not be an apt description of Stephen Batchelor's
stance. It is certaintly not an apt description of my own position.
I am quite happy to identify myself as a Buddhist in an
institutionalized sense. I have formally and publicly gone for
refuge and often teach in institutional Buddhist settings to
my fellow Buddhists using the technical terms and dogmas that
Buddhists have been using for centuries. I am not at all allergic to
the word "religion". I am, however, deeply allergic to the
term "spiritual". The word conveys very little to me, and I tend not
to use it much. I see no negative valences associated with the word
"Buddhism". It is one narrow presentation of a much wider phenomenon
known as Dharma. I like both the narrow presentation known as
Buddhism and the more universal phenomenon known as Dharma (which, I
take it, includes Hinduism, Confucianism, Christianity, Judaism and
Islam).

> What truth about suffering might Buddhists be hiding with their
> emphasis on the mind?

I see no hiding at all. The usual enumeration of forms of pain
includes birth, illness, injury, aging and death, as well as
depression, disappointment, sorrow, grief and despair. More detailed
elaborations include such things as (involuntary) poverty,
imprisonment, torture, war and various kinds of abuse of power. I
see no attempt to hide anything social or physical by merely
including in the large list of flavours of dukkha a few that are
mostly psychological.

> But even if one does not question at a fundamental level the
> Buddhist description of suffering as a mental phenomenon, how
> does one escape from _beliefs_?

No one that I know about claims to be escaping from beliefs
altogether. Rather, as I mentioned before, what an agnostic is doing
is simply being honest in saying that SOME beliefs are neither
verifaible nor falsifiable given the current state of evidence. If
you read Batchelor or Hayes with care, you'll see that this is what
they are saying. You will see that they are not saying that one
should have no beliefs whatseover.

> Can one be a "Buddhist" without accepting a definition of duhkha
> in terms of the skandhas, or the system of practices described
> as the eightfold path? From an outsider's point of view these
> _are_ "beliefs," just as certainly as the Christian dogma of
> original sin and drama of redemption.

Well, yes. I cannot imagine you'll get much argument from anyone
over this. A Buddhist skeptic and a Buddhist agnostic would both be
perfectly happy to acknowledge that they believe there is birth,
illness, injury, death, poverty, injustic, war, despair, sorrow,
grief, disappointment and discontent, and that all these things
involve a certain amount of physical and/or psychological pain.

It is not the first truth but the second that requires the formation
of a controversial hypothesis. The second "truth" is more of an
hypothesis, naemly, that the principal cause of pain is desire or
expectation. This, I think, is quite easily tested. That is, it is a
faslsifiable claim. As a belief, it is for me (skeptical though I
may be) a belief that has not been falsified. So it is still a
contender.

> For the non-Buddhist this response represents a mess of
> _beliefs_, not least because samyagdrsti, not adrsti, is one of
> the eight steps on the path.

On this matter, things are no different for Buddhists, even those
of the agnostic or skpetical variety.

> One can experience the skandhas, bodhi, the efficacy of the
> eightfold path, sunyata, etc. etc., but can one falsify any of
> these?

One cannot experience sunyata at all. It is merely an idea, a
heuristic model. Bodhi is simply another name for the elimination of
certain specified delusions. As for the efficacy of the eightfold
path, it can easily be falsified, in principle at least. If one were
to be deluded and to live a life dedicated to harming others and
cheating everyone possible and being deceitful to as many people as
possible and if one were to derive deep and lasting pleasure and
satisfaction from such a life, then one would have falsified the
eightfold path. I gather that some people have indeed concluded that
the eightfold path is false in their experience. I have not.

> If not, are they actually suitable objects of agnosticism?

Agnosticism consists in nothing more than saying "I don't know" when
in fact one does not know about something. If one feels the evidence
is inconclusive about the relationship between how one lives and
whether one is contented, the one does not know about the eightfold
path. Batchelor and I do not claim not to be able to know about the
eightfold path. Where Batcehlor says "I don't know" is about certain
other Buddhist dogmas, such as the dogma of rebirth, which he
regards as an untestable dogma and therefore one about which no
knowledge is possible. A belief about rebirth is unwarranted. It is
only THIS kind of belief, the unwarranted kind, that Batchelor
advocates doing without.

> In other words, what is gained by saying one is "uncertain"
> about something that is not even a legitimate object of
> knowledge?

If something is not a candidate for knowledge, then the only thing
one can honestly say about it is "I don't know". So it is precisely
that kind of proposition, the kind that is not knowable, that is the
most legitimate object of agnosticism.

> But then again I'm a skeptical Deadhead living in Southern
> California.

I think I'm beginning to gain some insight into your problem. I
suggest moving away from Southern California. No one there has much
clarity. You're constantly in contact with people there who live on
a diet of cocaine and amphetemines. May I recommend moving to New
Mexico or South Dakota?  People are much more clear in their
thinking in those places.

> What kind of skandh transfers the acts from the last lives?

All of them. According to Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakosha, the entire
world of experience is the result of the ripening of all the karma
of all sentient beings.

The physical world in which we live takes the shape it has becase of
the accumulated results of all the greed, hatred and delusion of
sentient beings everywhere. A good example of that principle at work
appeared in the Montreal Gazette yesterday morning. In that august
newspaper there was an article stating that many scientists now
favour the hypothesis that the severe droughts in Africa and the
American southwest are the result of the effect of particles in the
atmosphere that originated in industrial processes such as power
plants. American and European greed for electrical energy (of the
sort necessary to use computers and send e-mail messages everywhere)
may be responsible for the deaths by stravation of over one million
Africans.

So the physical world is the ripening of karma. And whoever lives in
this world is experiencing this world as a result of a desire for
survival, which is genetically encoded in the physical body. So the
principal carrier of unripened karma is the material world. All the
other skandhas are also carriers, of course, but the main vehicle is
the material aggregate.

This is perhaps why the Buddha said that if you have to choose
between matter and mind as a self, matter would be a much better
choice, since it is immeasurably more durable than thought. In the
final analysis, of course, even matter is quite unstable, so it also
fails to qualify as a candidate for the self, if by self one means
that which remains fixed in nature and is therefore predictable and
capable of being brought under control of the will.


>I have recently come across the phenomenon of  "sceptical Buddhism" or
>"Buddhism without beliefs," and have a question to ask of anybody who might
>care to answer.

First of all, there MAY be a slight difference between agnostic Buddhism and
skeptical Buddhism. Stephen Batchelor describes himself as an agnostic, by
which he means that he regards certain questions as beyond our capacity to
know. On these questions, he says, the only intellectually honest approach is
to suspend judgment and not to claim to know what in fact one cannot be in a
position to know. (He is, for example, an agnostic about rebirth.) He does not
claim to be absolutely without beliefs, however. Rather, he claims to be
without beliefs about only those things in which having a belief would be to
overstep the warrants provided by available evidence. He suggests it is better
to have no belief about such issues than to hold unwarranted beliefs.

I describe myself as a skeptical Buddhist in Land of No Buddha:
Reflections of a Sceptical Buddhist. All I mean by "skeptical" (which in
Canada and the USA I spell with a "k", while in England, where my book was
published, they prefer using a "c")is willing to continue critical and
open-minded investigating rather than arriving at a premature conclusion. I
personally see very little difference between what I call "skepticism" and
what Batchelor calls "agnosticism", but perhaps others would see us as
different in some important way.

>How does a sceptical Buddhist, one who does not have "beliefs," understand
>the first noble truth?

The same as everyone else, I think.

>For instance, the Mulasarvastivada vinaya's version of the Turning of the
>Dharma Wheel Sutra characterizes duhkha using the following examples:
>separation from the pleasant; contact with the unpleasant; not getting what
>you want, though you strive after it; and finally, the five aggregates
>(skandhas), which are the basis for clinging to existence.
>
>Will a sceptical Buddhist, one who does not have beliefs, accept this
>canonical characterization of duhkha in its entirety?

I certainly would. As far as I can tell from reading just about everything
that Batchelor has ever written and from talking to him and corresponding with
him, he would concur. That not getting what one wants is a pretty good working
definition of disappointment (dukkha) seems indisputable to me. It is not one
of those things about which a suspension of judgment is in order.

>Thanks in advance for any answers. For those looking to pick a fight, let me
>explain in advance, I am not a Buddhist.

THEN GET THE HELL OFF THIS LIST! ONLY BONE FIDE BUDDHISTS ARE ALLOWED HERE! NO
NON-BELIEVERS NEED APPLY! JESUS H. BUDDHA, MISTER, YOU GOT SOME NERVE COMING
AROUND HERE!

>(When students ask me about my
>religion, I tell them the truth: Deadhead.)

Why didn't you say so earlier? Look, you can stay on Buddha-L after all.
Forget what I said earlier. When students ask me about my religion, I ask them
how often they get laid. One invasion of privacy deserves another, it seems to
me. (On the other hand, I guess I pretty well blew my cover when I became
Buddhist chaplain at my local university. Now I have to admit that I'm a
Buddhist but a very bad one.)

> Could you provide some examples to the
> Lotus-Sutra-challenged such as myself: Glaring
> mismatches, subtle mismatches, what have you?

I suppose the most obvious issue is that the Lotus Sutra describes itself as
a text that many Buddhists will reject. It describes those Buddhists who do
not accept the Lotus Sutra as people overwhelmed with overweening pride and
suggests that such people are destined for hell, since they are reviling the
True Dharma. I know of no other Buddhist text that goes to such lengths to
condemn other Buddhists as people who are following a false Dharma.

The principal message of the Lotus Sutra is that the Lotus Sutra is a great
and powerful text. Part of that message also is that there is really only
one Buddha, namely Shakyamuni, and that he is eternal and therefore was
never born and will never die. This means that he never entered nirvana.
Those who preach that the goal of Buddhism is to attain nirvana are (you
guessed it) overwhelmed with overweening pride. The REAL goal of Buddhism,
says the Lotus Sutra, is to become an anuttara-samyak-sambuddha. More
accurately, the message is that everyone already IS an
anuttara-samyak-sambuddha and always has been and always will be, so really
there is no goal to attain. If Buddhist practice can be said to have any
goal at all, it is just to accept that one is already a Buddha and that the
Lotus Sutra supersedes every other Buddhist text and that those who think
otherwise be roast in the infernal flames.

What makes the Lotus Sutra different from all but a few other Buddhist texts
is that its message is one of intolerance toward other forms of Buddhism.
Indeed, one might say that the principal message of the Lotus Sutra is to
say that nothing else that claims to be Buddhism is actually Buddhism at all
but is in fact some sort of grotesque caricature of the True Dharma.

About ten years ago, I wrote a message to BUDDHA-L about the Lotus Sutra. It
said pretty much the same thing as this message is saying. About two weeks
later I received a postcard postmarked in Connecticut on which someone had
formed a message by cutting out letters from a magazine and pasting them
onto the card. It said "YOU ARE OVERWHELMED WITH OVERWEENING PRIDE AND HAVE
SET OUT TO DESTROY THE DHARMA." I was never quite sure whether the postcard
was meant as a joke or as a warning. Indeed, I have never been quite sure
whether the Lotus Sutra itself was meant as a joke; I can easily imagine a
bunch of Brahmins getting together and writing a kind of satirical spoof of
Buddhism just to amuse themselves by making Buddhism look thoroughly absurd.
Since I love a good hoax, I am inclined to give the Lotus Sutra the benefit
of the doubt by assuming it is one of the most clever hoaxes every
perpetrated in the history of religion.


> The initial question was, is logic, that is, being concerned
> with how to set up syllogism, etc., and the closely written
> scripts used in some institutions really that useful for
> liberation

The methods of the so-called logicians (which is, I think, a potentially
misleading translation) have almost nothing to do with setting up
syllogisms properly. The method of these people is to closely examine the
criteria by which one arrives at conclusions. The aim of this method is
discovering how very little (one is tempted to say nothing) of what a
person believes is warranted. By using the methods of the so-called
logicians (whom I prefer to call epistemologists), one begins to see that
all beliefs are merely constructs and essentially arbitrary, and that all
personal experiences are in fact belief-driven interpretations and
therefore not to be blindly trusted as confirming the very beliefs that
condition them.  When one sees all this, one is liberated from a great
deal of prapanca, avidyaa, craving and resistance to others, which are the
root causes of most du.hkha. Careful logical analysis of beliefs and
dogmas is, for some of us, the swiftest route to overcoming attachments
based on false dichotomies.

> while I find rigs gter and related texts enormously fun to read

Then you may not be reading them correctly. They are not meant to be fun.
They are meant to help you overcome your own dogmatic obsessions, not to
help you win debates against opponents.  Usually this process of becoming
aware of the groundlessness of all one's beliefs is just a little
unsettling and even slightly painful. But, as S'aantideva observes, it is
like the pain of removing a thorn with a needle---a small pain that
relieves a much greater one.

> I don't think it is really very useful for practice

Then you obviously have a narrow vision of what practice consists
in---perhaps even overly narrow. While I would never make the study of
epistemology my only practice, I can't imagine a very useful practice
without it.

> not in the same way that say the Ko'sa is useful or the
> Visuddhimagga.

The Abhidharmako'sa, if one does not read it through the filters provided
by the epistemologists (pramaa.na-vaadins), simply fills the mind with
dogmas, most of which were questionable even two thousand years ago and
are certainly outmoded these days.  The application of careful reasoning
can help liberate the mind from all those structures that abhidharma
provides and can help one see just how arbitrary abhidharma (or any
systematic presentation) is. As for the Visuddhimaggo, I agree it is one
of the world's greatest texts on the meditative practices of Theravaada
Buddhism, and it has been the principal basis of my own contemplative life
for the past thirty-plus years, but I think its utility would be
drastically limited if one did not approach it with the lucid and critical
mind of a cheerful logician.

Now why don't you ask Stephen Hodge who his very clever 'lama' in
Varanasi was? (What kind of lama wold let his disciples distribute his
teachings under such silly titles as "The Middle-length Discourses"?)

> Generally speaking, Sakyapas tend to think logic is interesting,
> but mundane.

Omoshiroi. So if what you say is true, it would seem that Sakyapas
generally think the same of logicians as many logicians think of Sakyapas,
namely, that they are interesting but mundane.

> Since the nature of things is beyond description and beyond mind

This, I suspect, depends a great deal on whose mind you are talking
about.

> logic is therefore of limited value in terms of liberation.

My experience has been exactly the opposite. I find that logic has
liberated me from all kinds of prejudices, unwarranted assumptions,
half-baked ideas and fantasies that, if I had not eliminated them, would
probably have continued to cause me all manner of trouble. I suspect other
people have found other ways to liberate themselves from what causes them
trouble. Perhaps the best ticket is not to make hasty generalizations
about what is and what is not liberative.

> Since at best, even the most subtle reasonings in relationship
> to the nature of things will only ever be a linguistic and
> therefore, conceptual approximation, and since liberation is a
> state beyond mind, and concepts, logic will never get one there.

It seems to me that you could perhaps use the services of some
kind-hearted logician, who might be capable of liberating you from all the
assumptions and prejudices embedded in that sentence of yours. If your
proposition is helping you become free of some set of kleshas (which, by
the way, are best understood as afflictions and not as defilements), then
of course you should not discard all those unwarranted assumptions too
precipitantly. But if your fantasies about realities beyond the range of
conceptualization are doing nothing more than helping you denigrate the
liberative techniques of others, then perhaps some kind of logical help is
just what the doctor ordered.

> Another reason is that they are addicted to books and debate and
> do not practice enough.

According to whom is reading books and engaging in debate not a form of
practice?  Surely if one approaches those activities in the right way, it
is no less liberative than doing visualization practices, working on a
koan, expressing one's gratitude to Amitabha, doing prostrations, building
meditation halls, lighting votive candles to the Blessed Virgin Mary or
tending a garden.

> Given that this is so, I will now try to cure myself of the
> habit of causing controversies and distracting people, including
> myself, from practice.

Suit yourself. Controversy has never been a distraction to me.  Looking at
all sides of a controversial issue is one of my practices. But if your
practice, whatever it may be, is somehow thrown off by making
pronouncements about the limitations of other people's practice, then it
is indeed wise of you to learn to desist from such pronouncements. Best of
luck to you.

> Was there a discussion about the origin of Heart Sutra on this list?

There have been many over the years. If you would like to search the
archives of the past year for this or any other topic, send this command
to listserv@listserv.louisville.edu:

get buddha-l faq

That will retrieve a file explaining how to search the archives and
fetch articles on a given topic. Happy searching and fetching!

>  What is the origin anyway?

Short answer: China.

Longer answer: It appears to be a Chinese summary of points made in
numerous longer Praj~naa-paaramitaa suutras originally composed in
Sanskrit and then translated into Chinese. Its original title was
probably something like Perfection of Wisdom for Dummies. It was so
successful as a textbook and summary of Perfection of Wisdom
materials that it was eventually translated into rather bad
Sanskrit.

> I had understood that karma (including vipaaka - the whole
> bundle) is a sort of law of nature, a bit like the law of
> gravity.  Not so?

My claim that karma is not a law but a dogma was a bit too succinct
and therefore confusing. I think it might have been more accurate to
say that the modern Western dogma about karma is that it is a law,
rather like the law of gravity or the law of entropy (my own
personal favourite among the laws of physics, because I obey it so
effortlessly).

If you are interested in reading an excellent article about the
history of the doctrine of karma in India (and, to a lesser extent,
its appropriation in the modern west), get ahold of the Routledge
Encyclopedia of Philosophy and read "Karma and rebirth, Indian
conceptions of" by Wilhelm Halbfass. Halbfass discusses this whole
issue of the Western vision of karma as a sort of natural law.

Incidentally, if you can get access to the CD-ROM version of the
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, do a search for "caste". There
is no single article on that topic, but there are many references to
it scattered in many excellent articles (some of them written by our
own Dan Lusthaus) throughout the Encyclopedia. I daresay that in
that Encyclopedia you will find much more accurate information about
how caste has been regarded in ancient, medieval and modern India
than you will get by reading some of the ideologues who have
recently been trying to dominate discussions on BUDDHA-L.

> Or, what is the basis of the dogma, who promulgated it, and for
> what purpose?

To make a very long story short, it was promulgated for the purpose
of crowd control by those who had a vested interest in keeping the
crowds under control.

> Since I too abhor dogmas - but love nature - I want to be sure I
> get it right.

Nature is indeed a lovable flow of interrelated phenomena. I have
found that I relate to nature best when I forget about all the laws
that human beings keep imagining they see there. Nature reveals
itself best when one just watches events come and go. I think that
may also have been how some early Buddhists experienced nature.
Consider, for example, this passage (Anguttara-nikaaya 10.7) in
which Saariputto talks about how he saw the world while in a state
of deep concentration:

begin{quote}
 The stopping of becoming---nibbana---the stopping of
 becoming---nibbana': One perception arose in me as another perception
 stopped. Just as in a blazing woodchip fire, one flame arises as
 another flame disappears, even so, `The stopping of
 becoming---nibbana---the stopping of becoming---nibbana': One
 perception arose in me as another one stopped. I was percipient of the
 stopping of becoming---nibbana.
end{quote}

> There was a Canon in Sanskrit, with a Vinaya, etc., belonging to
> the Sarvaastivaadins, who, in distinction to the rest of the
> Buddhist world, apparently, chose to call their canon "Agamas"
> instead of "Nikaayas". It survives in Chinese translation only.

It's a little more coplicated than this. According to Akira HIRAKAWA,
A History of Indian Buddhism, pp. 72, the Chinese translation
of the Diirghaagama belonged to the Dharmaguptaka school. The Chinese
translations of the Madhyamaagama and Sa.myuktaagama belonged to the
Sarvaastivaadins. The affiliation of the other two aagamas is not
known.

The Chinese canon also contains five full vinayas, namely, those of
the Dharmaguptakas, the Sarvaastivaadins, the Mahiis'aasakas, the
Mahaasangikas and the Muulasarvaastivaadins. If I am not mistaken, the
East Asian Buddhists now follow the Dharmaguptaka vinaya, the only one
under which it is still possible for a woman to receive full
ordination, which is why Tibetan and Theravaadin women who wish to
receive full ordination must go to Taiwan or Korea. The Tibetan males,
I think, follow the Muulasarvaastivaadin vinaya.

> It is, I believe, one of the great historical blunders, that King
> Ralpachan ordered the Tibetan translators of the ninth century to
> skip the "hinayaana" suutraas.

Yes, that was quite a gaffe. But it's never too late. One of the great
hidden benefits of the Tibetan diaspora has been that at least some
Tibetan teachers have finally been able to learn more about, and come
to respect, Theravaada. This is one of the things that makes
contemporary Buddhism so fascinating. You find Theravaadins seriously
studying Naagaarjuna and Hui Neng, and you find Japanese and Tibetan
Buddhists earnestly studying the very rich Pali and Sanskrit canons.
The result can only be healthy, I should think.

> Therefore, your argument that varna is based on Hindu
> dharma-sutras is not going to find much sympathy with we
> Buddhists; especially when Buddha, so clearly in many places,
> taught that the varna or jati was a human contrivance, and that
> external ritual purity is a fiction.

Thank your for pointing this out. It is worth remembering that one
can find it said in the Sutta-nipaata that whereas rabbits and birds
fall into natural species (jaati), and whereas the human race as a
whole is a natural species (jaati), the distinctions made within the
human race, such as Brahman and so forth, are not natural jaati at
all but rather are purely human contrivances. One also finds in the
Sutta-nipaata a brilliant satire of Brahmanical creation myths. In
these satires, the Brahmans are portrayed as people who used to be
pure in conduct but who got too lazy to do real work and decided to
make a livelihood by duping the general population into believing
that the proper running of the world requires the droning of mantras
by a special class of men. One also finds some very funny spoofs of
Brahmanical claims of superiority in such texts as the Kutadanta
Sutta in the Diigha-nikaaya. It is, it would seem, not only modern
leftist Christian academics who made sport of Brahmanical views of
jaati.

On the philosophical plane, most of the Buddhist scholastics who
took a nominalist position argued that ALL notions of jaati are
purely conventional and human-made. In the long philosophical
battles between the likes of Dignaga, Dharmakiirti, S'aantarak.sita
and Kamalas'iila on the Buddhist side and Udayana, Jayanta and
Uddyotakara on the Brahmanical side, the Buddhists argued repeatedly
that all notions of jaati, but ESPECIALLY the notion that Brahmans
and other varna groups consistute separate jaati (natural classes
that stay in effect from birth to death), are unsupportable. Again,
it is absurd to claim, as some are wont to do, that this issue of
denying the validity of caste is one invented by British
imperialists, Christian missionaries, American leftists and Western
converts to Buddhism. People who make that sort of claim obviously
know very little about the history of Buddhist philosophy in
what we now call India.

It has been highly entertaining to watch various people tie
themselves into knots over this topic. Alas, my expertise in knots
has degenrated since I left the Boy Scouts, so I am not sure I can
identify just which knots some of our friends here have got
themselves into. They look a bit like Gordian knots, impossible to
untie and of no practical use whatsoever.

I wonder whether we can agree now to give this topic a rest.
Everyone seems to have stated his or her point of view several times
over, and there is no sign of either side in the debate either
changing perspectives or coming up with anything new to say. (If I
may be permitted to say something that no one has ever observed
before now "There is nothing new under the sun." Remember, you
heard it here first!)

> (CNN) -- Two teenage lovers in North India have been hanged to death
> by their parents, who opposed their inter-caste relationship, The
> Times of India has reported.
>
> The relationship was exposed Monday night when their parents, acting
> on a tip-off from locals, caught the lovers during a rendezvous on
> the outskirts of the village in Uttar Pradesh.

Malcolm, it is very good to see your messages on BUDDHA-L again. You
always have good things to say. But I must remind you, since you do
not seem to have understood the point, that as a non-Indian you are
surely misunderstanding why the mixed-caste lovers were hanged. It had
nothing whatsoever to do with religion. It was purely economic. You
see, you have to be an Indian, preferably one living in the South, to
be able to make the subtle distinction between economic and religious
issues.

In 2000, there was an excellent PhD thesis at McGill written by Arti
Dhand on the topic of caste and gender issues in the Mahabharata. (She
had written her MA thesis on the same topic in the Ramayana.) Dr Dhand
read the entire MBh and noted every instance where warnings were given
about the severe dangers involved in letting people of mixed caste
have children, whether in or out of wedlock. It was especially
dangerous when a Brahman woman was despoiled by a man of low caste.
Indeed, the entire Kali-yuga (the age of strife) is said hundreds of
times in the MBH to be the result of the mixture of caste blood,
especially the mixing of "high" women with "low" men. (Interestingly
enough, there was not so much concern about "high" men consorting with
"low" women.)

Much of the rhetoric in the MBh sounds amazingly similar to the kinds
of things one used to hear American racists say about whatever ethnic
group they most feared: "They are interested only in our women." So
one could be forgiven for thinking that quite a lot of the literature
of what we now call Hinduism was produced by Brahman males who were
terrified that their women were seeking out real men while they, the
Brahman males, were doing all those ridiculous ceremonials that
required them to be "uncontaminated" by polluting contact with women.
But again, I must emphasize that all this concern with pollution was
purely economic in nature and not in any way religious. In fact, you
might say that the Brahman males' obsession with pollution made them
the first true environmentalists.

> Even the Amerindians are supposed to have wandered over from
> Siberia and into the northwestmost portion of America and from
> there down all the way to the tip of south America.

About twenty-five years ago a museum of natural history in Canada
found itself faced with an interesting quandary when a group of
Amerindians made representation and requested that the museum stop
promoting the theory that these people had migrated from Asia. This
theory, they said, was an unsupportable myth that had been invented by
Europeans to justify their own colonization of the Americas. By
claiming that Amerindians had migrated here, Europeans could claim
that they were simply doing the same thing, just a few centuries
later. When the museum considered honouring the demands of the
allegedly autochthonous peoples, archaeologists got into the act and
argued that that no one's ethnic sensibilities should be allowed to
trump science. So the museum found itself in the middle of a dispute
between outraged natives and equally outraged archaeologists. I forget
which side won. For all I know, they are still arguing.

There is a lot of arguing going on right now over two sets of findings
by archaeologists that have deeply upset native peoples in the
American Southwest. One finding is pretty much indisputable evidence
that some of the native people practised cannibalism about two
thousand years ago. (One might ask "Who cares? That was then, this is
now. They didn't have access to MacDonalds and fry bread then, and a
fella has to eat.") The second is a study of DNA tests that strongly
suggest that there were probably a significant number of people of
European stock romping around in the Southwest about a millennium
before Christ. To make matters worse, these Europeans' remains are
older than any human remains that have ever been found in North
America. This latter finding, of course, seems to put into question
the claim of the natives that this land is naturally theirs.
Unfortunately, no one has yet thought of saying "What the hell
difference does it make who got here first? We're all here now. Let's
all join hands now and sing `This land is your Land. This land is my
land...'."

Exactly whose land is any of America anyway? Most of the native
peoples were nomadic. The Lakota, famous for inhabiting the prairies,
were originally in the eastern woodlands. The Dine (Navajo/Apache) who
fought ferociously for their turf a little more than a century ago
actually moved here from Canada in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, displacing many peoples whom they collectively called the
Anasazi (the "ancient ones"). The Utes, after whom Utah was named,
drifted over the Rockies from the prairies when the more aggressive
Lakota moved into the neighbourhood from the woodlands of the eastern
part of the continent. As you say, Jinavamsa, it would be a nightmare
to try to sort out which land belongs to whom. And this brings us to
Buddhism.

Recently I have been teaching a class at University of New Mexico on
the evolution of the anaatman doctrine in Buddhism in India and
Southeast Asia. One of the texts we have been using is Donald
Swearer's translation of the late Bhikkhu Buddhadasa's talks entitled
Me and Mine. I first read those essays some time ago but have
been swept away by them again on a second reading. Seeing the world
around us today, I am so struck by how much pain, suffering,
destruction, bloodshed and death is taking place as people desperately
cling to their sense of ethnic identity and to some notion that a
piece of land is "ours", whether the claim is backed up by some sort
of historical considerations or by theological claims. (The Navajo,
for example, claim their territory is theirs because they were led
there by the yei, the Dine gods. The gods and/or God seems to have
been quite a broker at one time, because they or he or she seems to
have given out a bit of land to everyone, often inconveniently giving
the same land to several people.)

It is impossible to imagine all this senseless killing coming to an
end until people somehow learn to stop thinking that land and other
things belong to them. (Here is where the incurable Romantic in me
pipes up and pithily quotes the old Rousseauian Buddhist addage
"Property is theft!" and then takes a look at all these folks shedding
blood over a chunk of real estate and says, with deep compassion for
both sides of course, "A plague on both of your houses.")

And now I promise this will be my last word on this painful subject. A
few weeks ago my beloved mate and I went to an Anglican Easter service
(although here in New Mexico "Anglican" is pronounced "Episcopalian").
The Bishop of Santa Fe opened the eulogy with a minute of silence
(actually, it lasted for only thirty-seven seconds) for all of our
Christian brothers and sisters who are dying in or have been displaced
from the Holy Land. I damn near broke the truncated silence by saying
"Hey! How about some silence for all our Jewish brothers and sisters
who are dying over there and hiding behind locked doors? And how about
some silence for our Muslim brothers and sisters? And how about some
silence for plain old atheists and materialists? And why single out
the so-called Holy Land? How about some silence for ethnic Bangla
Muslim brothers and sisters who are being persecuted by the Buddhist
Baamas in Myanmar? And how about some silence for Tamils who are being
pushed around by Buddhists in Sri Lanka? And how about some silence
for all the Dalits who according to my brother Nanda are happy as
clams all over India, where not a single Brahmana has ever in any way
oppressed them but who somehow labour under the delusion that they are
not actually doing all that well? And how about some silence for...."
But, alas, I remained silent. And now I feel ashamed for doing so.
Deeply ashamed.

> If Buddha-L can be a forum for messages offering support and
> understanding for Palestinian violence

BUDDHA-L has never been used as a forum for offering support for
anyone's violence against anyone. It is always helpful, I think, to
try to put oneself into the position of another person. It is not at
all difficult for people to put themselves in the position of people
who are being terrorized by random suicide bombers (please note that
I refuse to call such people "martyrs"). It is more challenging for
most of us to try to see the world from the perspective of someone
who feels she has no alternatives to desparately violent actions
left. Nothing, I think, is gained by pinning such labels as
"terrorist" or even "enemy" on others, nor is anything to be gained
by condoning some evils but deploring others that are responses to
them.

> we all strive to bring what we view to be the truth to the
> attention of as many people as possible, but in this case, I
> believe the subject falls outside the mandate of the list.

Putting onself in the position of another is a basic Buddhist
practice. In sending a copy of that letter, which was not my opinion
but the opinion of a Jemez Pueblo Indian named Gonzalo, and in
writing a prologue to his letter, I was simply trying to put myself
into the position of a member of an oppressed minority's
perspectives on events in other parts of the world. It was my hope
(I admit) that a few other people might challenge themselves by
seeing whether they could exchange self with other in about the same
way.

> Now, according to the law of karma, am I the author of my own
> misfortune or is another to blame for my problems?

First of all, karma is not a law. Nowhere in any Indian text is
karma referred to as a law. Karma is perhaps best described as a
dogma. Since I abhor dogmas, I tend not to trade in them. So let me
leave you to respond to your own question, for I have no idea what
to say when people pose such questions.

>> It is, however, difficult to be sincere about a
>> religion that one feels has been a source of
>> oppression.
>
> Actually most people in India who're not influenced by Marxist
> or Christian missionary propoganda knows the falsity of this
> statement - even Dalits themselves - and it is only natural that
> you who are not an Indian are easily impressed by such views
> because they map to the oppressive history of your own society.

I am impressed by what people tell me about their own experiences. I
have had the good fortune to know a good many Dalits, and many of
them do report that they found Hinduism oppressive and chose to
leave it behind. Why deny the validity of their own feelings about
their own experiences? That would be as useless as to say that their
experiences are universal. All I have said is that when a person
feels that a particular system of practice and doctrine is
oppressive, then she is likely to seek out alternatives. It takes
neither a Marxist nor a Christian missionary to see that.

>> It is also difficult to be sincere about a religion
>> that doesn't satisfy one emotionally.
>
> Who can say what satisfies another person emotionally?

I am inclined to give credence to people's reports of their own
emotional states. People whom I have known well have told me how
they feel. I am not such a clever prick that I feel I know how
people feel better than they themselves do. So I naively believe
what they tell me.

> In religious festivals in TamilNadu Dalits out of fierce
> devotion for their traditional Gods, pierce their tongues or
> cheeks with little spears, walk on coals of fire etc

Perhaps they are not dissatisifed with their religion. I was
speaking about those who are. See, Dr Chandran, what you are doing
is equivalent to someone responding to a woman's claim that she has
been raped by saying "I know plenty of women who have never been
raped, so this woman is obviously lying."

> They have been doing so for millenea and will continue to do so
> for millenea. To claim this form of devotion to be inferior to
> some intellectual form of relgion is atbest intellectual
> arrogance.

No one has made such a claim, but if they were to do so, I agree it
would reflect a degree of arrogance.

> You've missed Christianity

No, I don't miss Christianity very much at all.

> I see that your imagination has immediately caught on to the
> reference of the dalit as the flower vendor - only natural since
> economics is the basis on which your own society revolves.

Sorry, Dr Chandran, but as a non-American you completely fail to
understand the dynamics of American society. Michael Jordan (a
basketball player who moonlight by peddling shoes) is worth millions
of dollars, but in some neighbourhoods he would still be seen as
nothing but a nigger. Money has nothing to do with it. Recent
studies have shown that even highly educated African-Americans are
still not given as much respect in many contexts as less
well-educated people of European descent.

> But as said before varna classification is not based on
> economics

True, it's based more on racism. The very word "varna" gives it
away. It's all based on colour.

> - the temple priest is in all probability poorer than the flower
> vendor.

And I am much poorer than Michael Jordon or Michael Jackson (a
formerly black man who has tried to bleach himself white). But I'll
bet a hell of a lot more white folks would be willing to marry my
daughter than to marry theirs.

> while a brahmin like me is deliberately denied both based on the
> "popular" interpretation of the dharma shaastras

Oh stop it, Dr Chandran. You're breaking my heart. Here, give me
your address, and I'll send you a package of Girl Scout cookies to
salve your psychological scars.

> - the historical elite having made scapegoats of brahmins still
> continues to be the elite. In this scenario what discrimination
> are you talking about?

Nobody was talking about discrimination. We were talking about why
some Dalits have chosen to abandon Hinduism in favour of other
religions. It was, according to what they said, because they felt
oppressed. And as members of another religion they do not feel quite
so oppressed. It's as simple as that. There is really no need to get
all lathered up in a futile attempt to deny how people really feel
about their own situations, nor need one question the sincerity of
another person's personal religious convictions. In doing so, you
have missed the whole point of being a human being.

> I think we cannot afford ourselves the luxury of discussing who's
> right and who's wrong, or what the best terminology is.

Yes, I completely agree with this. It is impossible for me to see the
situation in the Middle East (or any other conflict) without the same
sympathy for everyone whose loved ones are dying. At the same time, it is
impossible for me not to feel that to some extent everyone is to blame for
fanning the flames rather than seeking a radically new way of looking at
the realities of their lives. What struck me about the letter I forwarded
was the similarity between the situation of native peoples in the Americas
and the situation of Palestinians. I cannot imagine it is much fun to be
completely overpowered by hostile and self-righteous invaders, and I find
it useful to try to put myself, if only in unhappy imagination, into their
dreary sandals.

I also find it useful to look at situations in the way recommended by the
Second Vatical Council, who adopted a policy knwon as "preferential option
for the poor." What that amounts to is looking at all these tragic
situations in which people on both sides are dying unnecessarily and then
giving moral support to the less powerful faction. This does not entail
taking up their side in exclusion of the other side. Rather, it amounts to
realizing that the more powerful side is usually far less discouraged and
less in need of moral support. It entails offering help to victims on all
sides but perhaps giving just a bit more support to the underdogs.

> The violence must stop.

I agree. But violence does not stop simply because it must. And it
certainly does not stop when people like you and me sit comfortably behind
our computer screens and demand that it stop. Violence has a mind of its
own, and it keeps itself alive by infecting the midns of people who used
to long for peace. Nothing is much more insidious than violence.

> But we keep it going if we support one of the fighting parties.

So what do you do when every party is fighting? Just ignore everyone?

> The Israeli people will never know peace if they don't give the
> Palestinians a reason to stop the bomb attacks. There are some brave
> Palestinians and Israelis out there who understand this, but as usual
> the common sense is not common at all.

Yesterday in my town there was a peace march initiated by a local Jewish
synagogue. The march began at the synagogue, stopped along the way to
commemorate the deaths on both sides and to pray for a free Palestinian
state. The march ended at a local mosque, where Jews, Christians, Muslims
(and a few Hindus and Buddhists) prayed together for peace and justice.
From what I have heard, such things are also going on in Israel and in the
territories occupied by Israelis. Such actions are, I am inclined to
believe, the right thing to do.

A few days ago, the following letter to the editors appeared in a
newspaper in Albuquerque, New Mexico (now part of the USA). The
author is a citizen of the Jemez Pueblo.

By way of background information, the Jemez people were conquered by
the Spanish and forced to convert to Christianity in the late 16th
century. They rebelled against the Spanish in the 17th century and
reclaimed their own language, religion and way of government. Within
a few years, however, they were brutally reconquered and returned to
Christianity, given Spanish names and made to speak Spanish. (Even
the name Jemez is a Spanish corruption of the name they give
themselves as a people.) Eventually their territory became part of
Mexico, was for a while claimed by Texas back when it was its own
country. In 1912, their territory became part of the United States
of America. By staying in pretty much the same mountains, the Jemez
went from being Spanish, to Mexican, to Texan to American. No matter
what country they were in, these people kept getting passed as a
conquered people to the newest wave of conqerors. For a long time
they were a Spanish-speaking Catholic minority in a land where
suddenly English had become the main language and Protestantism had
become the main religion. So the Jemez were considered "backward"
because they were dark-skinned, spoke Spanish and practised
Catholicism mixed with their own native "superstitions". Because
they were seen as backward, until recently the Jemez have had
shamefully little access to education, health facilities and many
other amenities that we American conquistodores who have invaded
their land (and water) have take for granted. So a Jemez person
knows something about political and economic conquest. When one of
them speaks about injustice, I tend to listen, just as I tend to
listen when a Dalit speaks about injustice. Here's the letter:

***
  Dear editors,
  
  Americans should reconsider their support of Israel. An overwhelming
  majority of Americans believe that Palestinians are terrorists and
  should submit to Israeli control. But what would we as Americans do if
  we were invaded and taken over by force by another ethnic group of
  people? What if America were so crushed by our oppressors that it was
  impossible for us to serve an army? We wouldn't surrender; we would
  take any means possible to reclaim our land, our country, our dignity
  and our self-respect.
  
  These so-called "terrorists" should be called freedom fighters. The
  Palestianians are not a sick, twisted and demented group of people as
  the media like to call them. They are rather a brave, determined and
  passionate people and are not afraid to die for the future of their
  people. I'm sure these suicide bombings ares just as heart-wrenching
  for the Palestinian people as they are for the Israelis. They are
  losing loved ones as well---but it is their only way to fight back.
  
  After the Second World War, the Jewish people, numb from the Holocaust
  and extreme anti-Semitism, were determined to establish a homeland for
  the Jewish people. Jews started flocking to Palestine with the support
  and protection of the United States and Great Britain and began
  growing their numbers. The Jews had a plan in mind: Zionism. The
  establishment of a Jewish state in the homeland, Palestine, and land
  that didn;t belong to them for 2000 years!
  
  DUring the war of Israeli independence and the six-day war of 1967
  there are well-documented stories of Israeli soldiers entering
  Palestinian villages and mowing down hundreds of innocent men, women
  and children with machine guns. Many of Israel's current leaders have
  blood on their hands from these massacres of innocent Palestianian
  life. Terrorism.
  
  Currently thousands of of innocent Palestinians sit in Israeli
  detention with no hope for release while Israelis bulldoze their homes
  and build Jewish homes on top of their land.
  
  Why should we expect the Palestinians to be peaceful? Would you be
  peaceful if someone was occupying your land? Would you accept half of
  your land returned with closed, heavily guarded borders as a peaceful
  agreement? It sounds like captivity to me.
  
  What Israel is doing to the Palestinians is exactly like what the
  Nazis did to the Jews in World War II
  
  Gonzalo
***

> For anybody who's sincere about religion it doesn't matter
> whether it is Hinduism or Buddhism

It is, however, difficult to be sincere about a religion that one
feels has been a source of oppression. It is also difficult to be
sincere about a religion that doesn't satisfy one emotionally. So
perhaps at a very advance level of practice in ANY religion, one
comes to the point where one can say that it truly does not matter
which religion one foloows. One can get to that advanced stage,
however, only by taking a path that gets one from where one is to
where one wants to be. And if where one is is an uncomfortable
place owing to various prejudices and biases, then one has to find a
way to work around that. For many Dalits, the way to work around the
unpleasant associations they have with Hinduism is to find another
religion that feels more comfortable. For some this religion has
been Sikhism, for others Islam, and for yet others Buddhism.

> - I know quite a few dalits - the flower vendors outside temples
> etc - who are very devoted and pious.

As someone else has pointed out before, to many of us Americans who
were involved in civil rights work forty years ago, this kind of
statement reminds us very much of people who fought to maintain the
status quo on the basis of the argument that "our niggers are
happy." That is, the statement sounds condescedning and uncaring to
our ears.

> Adherence to the dharma is the base on which people are judged.

I have talked to quite a number of Indians, Brahmans and Dalit
alike, who would tend to disagree with that pleasant-sounding
appraisal of the realities of social divisions in India.

> So in truth it matters little if a Dalit is a Hindu or Buddhist
> - as long as he adheres to the dharma he will always be
> respected by the society.

Right. And if people work hard, they will always succeed. And
nothing keeps a smart person out of Harvard except laziness. And
there is no limit to what one can achieve if one only makes a
sincere effort. And any man or woman can be elected President of the
United States (hence the huge number of women, blacks, Catholics and
Jews who have been among the US presidents.)

How wonderful it would be if things were as rosy as you portray
them, Dr Chandran. Have you ever thought of opening up a Pure Land?
I have a hunch you'd have many applicants to the beautiful world you
describe.

> Dalit Buddhists I have spoken with find much more than political
> recourse from abandoning the belief system and worship of Gods
> which in their view justify their oppression.  I know of many
> Dalit Buddists who take their Buddhist faith and practice quite
> seriously as a personal/religious stance--studying Buddhist
> literature, participating in Buddhist holidays/festivals,
> pursuing Buddhist teachings (requesting teachings from Tibetan
> lamas in Sarnath for example), and participating in meditation
> retreats, etc.

That has also been my experience. One of the most inspirational
Buddhist retreats I have ever been on was attended mostly by Dalits
residing in the area around Nagpur. I was impressed by how much they
knew about Buddhism, how serious they were in practising meditation
and how much thought they gave to following the precepts. One
afternoon, a couple of them were talking about issues of caste, and
one of the young men said "I hate all this talk about caste. My
parents tell me I should never forget that my ancestors were despised
untouchables. But thinking that way just makes me feel bad. I just
like to think of myself as a Buddhist. Right now I am a karate teacher
and a meditation teacher. Every day I work with Brahmans and people
from every other caste, and I teach students of all religions and
social backgrounds. Nobody seems to think of me as a despised
untouchable. Everyone thinks of me as a Buddhist lay person." That may
be just one person's experience, but it did give a certain amount of
texture to my previously flat preconceptions and stereotypes about
caste in India (which is almost as bewildering to me as the informal
social and racial and ethnic and historical boundaries that divide
people in New Hampshire, New Mexico and Quebec).

> It is a political movement, but it is much more than that to
> many who are involved.

Yes, for many individuals in India Buddhism has been the path out of
alcoholism, drug addiction and domestic violence into a much happier
world of gainful employment and self-respect. Is that political?
Maybe. But it is also getting rid of large amounts of unnecessary and
tragic dukkha. And that makes it pure Buddhism in my estimation.


> Is one of the implications of this that the Heart Sutra was then
> translated into Tibetan as an originally Sanskrit document?  If
> it happened once, it would be curious if it didn't happen on
> other occasions.

Yes, that is a possibility, although it should be borne in mind that
quite a few texts in the Tibetan and Mongolian versions of the
kanjur were translated directly from Chinese. Some of these may be
translations of translations, while others may be translations into
Tibetan of works originally written in Chinese but masquerading as
Chinese translations of Indian (not necessarily Sanskrit) originals.

Some years ago Robert Buswell did a study of a key Korean Son (Zen)
text that was, he concluded, surely composed in the Chinese language
by one or more Koreans. I have read somewhere that scholars in this
area believe that as much as 25% of the Chinese Buddhist canon is
made up of texts composed in Chinese but posing as texts translated
from an Indian language.

I imagine the process is something along the lines of what is
happening in the West. Some people bother to read translations of
classical Asian Buddhist texts, but most translations are, from a
purely literary point of view, pretty bad literature. People who
want to read good prose and poetry are more likely to read Walpola
Rahula, Chogyam Trunpa, Thanissaro Bhikkhu and Gary Snyder. It is
not difficult to imagine an English Buddhist canon eventually
emerging with "Mind Like Fire Unbound" as a key chunk of
buddha-vacana. And some well-meaning scribe might someday conclude
that the "Smoky the Bear Sutra" was an English translation of a
Sankrit text called Dhuumavat-parip.rcchaa-suutra.

The main thing to recall about all this, I reckon, is that the
provenience of a Buddhist text really does not matter to much of
anyone except some Thevavadins. If a text contains something useful,
it's quite acceptable as the equivalent of Buddha-vacana. If it
survives for several generations, it becomes canonical. Eventually
people just sort of assume it must actually be Buddha-vacana, and
no ome is in any way the worse for it.

> I seem to remember (if I'm not inventing it) that some scholars
> have the idea that Chinese became the source language for many
> of the existing translations of texts into Central Asian
> languages after about 500 AD (or CE if you prefer).

Yes, that is confirmed in the colophons of quite a few texts in the
Tibetan and Mongol kanjur.

> Reading Chris' message about lay Buddhist teachers led me via
> Vimalakirti to remember a concept that I was introduced to about a
> decade ago, which is that some sutras may have been "re-sanskritized"
> (or sanskritized pure and simple) from Chinese, or perhaps other
> sources.  Has anyone else encountered this notion, and do you know of
> any studies examining the evidence and reasoning that led to the
> existence of this phenomenon?  If the studies include a list of such
> sutras, that too would be good.

Jan Nattier wrote a long article about ten years ago arguing, with
considerable linguistic detail, that the Heart Sutra was probably
written in Chinese and then translated into Sanskrit. Her argument
was that the Heart was a Chinese summary of points made in a longer
Praj~naa-paraamitaa text that had been written in Sanskrit and
translated into Chinese. The Heart Sutra was, if she is right, sort
of like a Coles Notes on the PP literature, or perhaps a condensed
version of Perfection of Wisdom for Chinese Dummies that proved so
handy that some enterprising Chinese pilgrims sold it to Indian
bodhisattva candidates at Naalandaa as a crib sheet for their
Perfection of Wisdom exams. Then the Heart was translated into
Sanskrit and a few other other languages and became an international
best seller.

> There were well known lay Buddhist teachers in India e.g.
> Chandragomin - and Indian Buddhst Mahasiddhas like Indrabodhi,
> Saraha, Tilopa, Naropa, Virupa etc. who weren't exactly
> bhikshus.

Several years ago I was reading what I could find on the people who
formed translation teams for Indian Buddhist texts that eventually
became part of the bstan-'gyur. I was (pleasantly) surprised to find
that most of the most prominent translators were lay men [sic], and
quite a substantial number were non-Buddhist. Some of the
non-Buddhists may have been Jainas, but most were identified simply
as Brahmans. (They probably didn't know yet that they were Hindus.)
This is consistent with information from various sources that the
teachers at Vikramas'iila and Naalandaa included monks, laymen,
Buddhists and non-Buddhists. This pretty well falsifies the claim
that the best and most serious Buddhists in India were all monks.

>    As a proffessor, I'm curious as to what you think of Allan
> Watts statement that all religions are based on fantasies
> designed to deal with our fear of death.

I should imagine the statement indicates that Alan Watts was afraid
of death.  That undoubtedly led him to overlook the obvious fact
that many religious are based on a fear of sex. And if Watts had
lived in an arid region such as New Mexico or Arizona, he might have
realized that quite a few religions are based on a fear of running
out of water.

> Watts was a Buddhist, yet he always thought the point was to
> get to where you have no religion at all.

As far as I know, Watts was an Anglican priest. He managed to avoid
being a Buddhist, for which I think he is to be heartily
congratulated. As for his goal of getting to the point where
religion is unnecessary (which, I suppose happens only when one
fears neither death nor sex nor running out of water), I am inclined
to agree with him that such a goal is worthy of earnest pursuit.
(Perhaps Watts overlooked the obvious fact that some religions are
based on a fear of religions.)

There may be some things that human beings have invented that are
even worse than religion, but if so I am not sure what they are.
Television quiz shows come to mind as being a contender.

> Assuming no generic religious affiliation, I would like to ask
> you: *What can you mark as the genesis both of your religion and
> your belief in that religion?* Please don't think this a
> frivolous question.

Sorry, Troy, but try as I might, I cannot help seeing your questions
as frivolous. I cannot see what possible practical difference it
could make what the genesis of my religion might be, nor can I
really see any practical point in inquiring that the genesis of my
belief in my religion might be.

On the first issue, if a religion provides what I need, it would not
matter in the least whether it came from a herd of psychic
centipedes or from a lost Martian or from a cocaine addict in Baja
California. On the second issue, I find that I can rarely detect the
genesis on much of anything in my life. What was the genesis of my
interest in studying Sanskrit? What was the genesis of my interest
in watching birds, identifying wild flowers, reading Socrates or
practising yoga? Quien sabe? Que mas da?

> The nature of my inquiry is to try to isolate the barest
> essentials of _your_ religion as _you_ visualized it. I am not
> even looking for statements here -- just 2 or 3 items *reflecting
> the essential seeds of your religion*.

-- it has to come from some exotic place
-- it must require blind faith and unfailing loyalty to a leader of
questionable moral integrity
-- it must consist of painfully obvious truths and platitudes
couched in arcane jargon and obscure phraseology
-- it must be very costly
-- there should be a secret handshake and maybe some password in a
dead language (preferably a language never spoken before on the
planet earth)
-- it would be nice (but not absolutely essential) if there were
colourful uniforms for dues-paying members so that people could
readily identify us in airports

Have you got a religion for me, compadre?

> So, I suppose the order is the consolidation of "Hindu" thought
> and social order at the expense of Buddhist thought and social
> order.

This reminds me of a panel at the American Academy of Religions
about ten years ago that was dedicated to the topic of why Buddhism
died out in India. Every scholar, of course, had a different pet
theory, and eventually, needless to say, the temperature in the room
rose as each scholar groomed and paraded his pet. Finally someone
from the audience stood up and said "I honestly don't understand
this topic at all. Buddhism never died out in India. It has been
there all along. It's just that nowadays we call it Hinduism."

Although this was a somewhat flippant remark and was (like all the
pet theories being put on display) an oversimplification, it did
change the direction of the discussions onto a far more fruitful
trajectory.

I have often been struck by all the Buddhist, and to a lesser extent
Jain, elements in what some people call neo-Hinduism or even
neo-Vedanta. Swami Vivekananda and some other writers of the
Ramakrishna Mission read almost like suttas from the Pali canon,
except that Vivekananda's literary style is much more engaging, and
occasionally magnificent than the dry lists and inevitable tedious
repetitions of texts meant to be memorized and transmitted orally.
It seems as though after all the ungracious, ugly and vituperative
wrangling that Buddhists and Brahmans engaged in for a millennium or
so, the various factions began finally to listen to one another and
absorb the real benefits that the rival teachings had to offer. The
result, at least among the highly educated classes, seems to have
been a kind of pan-Indian religion that contained most of the best
and little of the worst of all the various factors that fed into it.

As a professor of comparative religions, I am inclined to want to
keep religious phenomena neatly separated and kept in their
respective cubby holes. So it is always therapeutic for me to go to
actual temples to see how mixed together things really are. For
example, a few days ago my mate and I went to a local Theravada
temple to meditate. On the altar there was the usual array of Thai
Buddha statues. But there was also a Chinese statue of the chubby
Maitreya (or Pu-tai? I forget that fat monk's Chinese name). And
next to Maitreya there was Kuan-yin. And next to her there was a
statue of the god Brahma. Now the stuffy professor in me might have
find this promiscuous mixing of Theravada, Mahayana and "Hindu"
elements a bit of a jolt, but the actual human being in me rejoices
at such recognitions that boundaries are nearly always artificial.

> How different people are.

Oh come on, Mike. You know very well that All is One and that One is
None!

> The Bodhicaryavatara is the *one* book I would choose to have
> with me, were I to be restricted to one.

I think I would choose something by Mark Twain if I could have only
one book. Or perhaps Umberto Eco's _The Name of the Rose_, which has
more insight into homo religiosus than anything ever written by anyone
other than Twain. (Most dialogues on BUDDHA-L are little more than
badly written versions of dialogues in that book.)

But back to S'aantideva for a moment. You say:

> To my mind, such writings are to be taken as antidotes. They
> thus depend on the nature of whatever it is that is to be
> overcome.

Yes, I think this is exactly right. During the past year I've been
reading the BCA with several advanced Sanskrit students, all of them
graduate students in philosophy . One thing they have all noticed is
how apparently inconsistent S'aantideva is from one passage to
another. (Grad students in philosophy have very keen noses for logical
inconsistency.) At one point he seems to be saying that people are so
horribly weak-willed that they can do nothing without something very
much like divine grace. In the next breath he is urging people to take
full responsibility for their thoughts and actions---just exactly the
sort of a thing a weak-willed person can't do.

The way I am inclined to read this sort of thing is that S'aantideva
is convinced that nothing can possibly be more damaging than greed,
hatred and delusion. So he provides dozens of "tricks" in the form of
arguments to help his readers bypass their tendencies to be greedy,
angry and deluded. These are the internal enemies that must be
defeated at all costs; logical inconsistency is a small price to pay
for the peace that comes from reducing greed, hatred and delusion.

Speaking of these strategies, a few weeks ago we were reading one of
the many verses that say, in effect, "If you are bothered by a fool,
then turn your anger against your own tendency to get bothered instead
of against the so-called fool." One of the people in the group said
"Hey, that's just exactly how my teenage daughter argues. If I say her
conduct bothers me, she tells me to find a way of dealing with it,
because she is just being who she is." I strongly suspect that what
S'aantideva may have had in mind was that a mature person would think
"If I am bothered, then I should find a way not to be so bothered,"
and (perhaps inconsistently) "If I am bothering others, then let me
find a way to be less bothersome to them", whereas the more adolescent
response might be "If YOU are bothered, then YOU should find a way not
to be so bothered." It makes all the difference in the world whether
one turns the advice inward as an invitation to purify one's own mind
or outward to taunt others.

> Personally, many of the problems that Shantideva tackles are those
> which I find in my own mind.

So far I have yet to meet anyone whose mind is completely free of the
afflictions that he talks about with such poetic skill.

> And yet I don't find his writings distasteful.

Same here. Mind you, I find greed, hatred and delusion pretty
distasteful at times, and since I tend to know my own more intimately
than anyone else's, I can get a bit disgusted as a result of reading
this guy, just because he hits the bulls-eye so often. I keep wishing
he would shoot at least a few arrows into the woods behind the target
instead of always hitting smack-dab in the centre of the target.

> Flesh and bones are unimportant.

Try going for a bicycle ride in nature on a beautiful spring day
without them. No, I'd have to disagree with you, Mike. I never leave
home without my flesh and bones, and I am quite grateful to have them
on loan from nature for a few years.

> On another point, what do you make of this famous stanza from chapter one:
>
> "Just as a flash of lightning on a dark, cloudy night
> For an instant brightly illuminates all,
> Likewise in this world, through the might of Buddha,
> A wholesome thought rarely and briefly appears."
>
> What is this "through the might of Buddha" stuff? Isn't it just plain
> theism?

What if it were? Would that make any difference?

> Or can it be interpreted as ascribing the origin of all goodness to
> the "buddha-nature" that is inherent in all?

You can interpret such things in any way that inspires you. The
context of such verses is a theme that runs throughout the BCA,
namely, that by focussing only one oneself and one's own abilities,
one is relatively impotent. One has power only when one lets others
into one's heart. So my own interpretation of this would be that the
Buddha is not "one's own" buddha-nature, but rather that
"buddha-nature" is the name we give to the fact that one is open to
being connected with others. And who knows? Perhaps one of the others
we need to be open to is something not so different from God or an
external Buddha-like force of benevolence. Why rule that out of
bounds?

> I'd love to hear about your approach to the Bodhicaryavatara.
> Personally, this is the one Buddhist "classic" that I never liked very
> much, and except for the ninth chapter I find it sentimental,
> puritanical and life-hating.

One of the principal things I like to look at is the psycho-dynamics of
the seven-limb puja, much of which is based on his text. I personally find
the puja a magnificent emotional symphony, and I try to bring some of this
out when looking at the Bodhicaryavatara as a source of Mahayana liturgy.

I find S'aantideva quite an interesting fellow. He seems to have been
given to extremes. He soars to great heights when praising the buddhas and
bodhisattvas and stoops to great depths of self-loathing and despair. His
psychological profile is quite similar to quite a few Western Buddhists I
have met, so studying his text with others seems to have a certain amount
of therapeutic value. Personally I relate very positively to the beauty of
his poetry and the imaginative imagery he creates through his words. I
like the text because it is damn good writing.

> I find this kind of stuff distastful:

Much of what he writes makes people uncomfortable. It is meant to, I
think. In reading the text with students I find it productive to explore
with people just why it is they have the reactions (both postive and
negative) they do. It opens up some very good discussions, I find.

> Whatever else you may say about it, at least Vajrayana seems to
> overcome this kind of sex/women/body-hatred.

I have no idea whether that is true or not, because I have no experience
with Vajrayaana. From what I have gathered from various Vajrayaanins I
have known, there is every bit as much opportunity for loathing the body
in that system as in any other. As for the forms of Buddhism I am familiar
with through practice, I have found that they have not made me hate my
body or anyone else's, not has it made me hate either sex or women. On the
contrary, I think I have come to be much more positive about all these
things than I was a few decades ago. So I suppose the hatred you speak of
is more of an individual matter than a systemic aspect of any particular
form of Buddhism.

> Yes, I know, its meant to help overcome attachment, but somehow
> methinks he doth protest a little >too< much.

Perhaps the good monk protested just exactly as much as he needed to
protest, given his own conditioning. Others may need less. Still others
may need even more. I tend to trust people's instincts to come up with
just about the right amount of positive and negative protesting for their
own personal needs.

> If people really think he knew what he was talking about, why
> don't they listen to what he said in the mahasatipatthana sutta
> and do it instead of inventing all kinds of multifarious
> mumbo-jumbo (rituals and prayers) and metaphysical speculations
> to distract themselves?

Well, as one who have spent most of my adult life practising the
four foundations of mindfulness as outlined in the
Mahaasatipatthaana Sutta, I began to find that a kind of gratitude
sometimes was wellin up in me, and I found myself looking around for
someone to thank. That led to imagining that the Buddha was present,
just so I could thank him and give him a peace of my mind. Just as
Buddhaghosa said in the Visuddhimagga, when one keeps the Buddha
constantly on one's mind, it's almost as if he is walking beside
one. And having a Buddha walking around with one has the effect of
keeping a fellow on his best behaviour.

The imagination is a very powerful tool. Why not use it to full
advantage in the campaign against dukkha? That is really all that
most Buddhists are doing. Not much is gained by denigrating their
activities as mumbo-jumbo. If you are still feeling a need to
ridicule what others are doing, then perhaps you have a little more
work to do on overcoming a certain amount of attachment to a
particular way of seeing things. Otherwise, you could be in danger
of distracting yourself with subtle feelings of superiority over
those who indulge in what you choose to see as mumbo jumbo.

> Why -- I am curious -- would someone have a wish for the US
> operation to be unsuccessful, and for the Afghani people to NOT be
> happy? Why would someone wish a whole nation misery just to make a
> (questionable) ideological point?

And just who, in your opinion, is not wishing for the US operation to
be successful? I don't know anyone at all anywhere who hopes that
terrorism and injustice will continue. Some of us, however, remain
unconvinced that in the longer run terrorism will be eliminated only
by taking violent measures against weak people. Even the very best US
policy-makers have never been particularly well informed about other
cultures and their values, and George W. Bush is very far from the
very best. He, and those with whom he has surrounded himself, are
rarely capable of seeing beyond their born-again Christian view that
Chrsit will return as soon as Israel is securely in the hands of the
Jews. We are dealing in this country not with reasonable men and women
of clear vision but with ideologues who are eager to hasten the
eschaton. In this they are not much different from Osama bin Laden and
the Taliban leaders. In a way, I have to confess that I really do hope
they fail in their mission to bring about the end of history. But that
does not mean I support terrorists, whether they be Palestinian,
American, Afghani or Israeli.

As my friend S'aantideva put it:

yadarthameva jiivaami tadeva yadi na"syati |
ki.m tena jiivitenaapi kevalaa"subhakaari.naa || 6.61||

BCA 6.61. If that for the sake of which I live perishes, then what is
the use of a livelihood that makes only ugliness?

I'm afraid that the values that drive most of what is done in the USA
really do create little but ugliness and pain and destruction, all for
the sake of short-term profits and happiness. Not everyone is
particularly happy about this, including the majority of Buddhists I
know.

> I'm not saying any of this is bad, although I'm still not sure that
> all this would count as "right view" in most Buddhist schools, Pure
> Land notwithstanding.

Just about the only thing that counts as wrong view in Buddhism are
the claims that one is not responsible for one's actions (karma), that
there is nothing that can be done about one's lot in life and that one
has nothing of importance to learn from wise people. Buddhism is not,
and never has been, a creedal religion that requires one to affirm or
deny any doctrines beyond the recognition that life is frustrating
when one has unrealistic expectations and gets a lot better when one
gets real. As for what is real, Buddhists are much more inclined to
say "find out" than to try to tell you the details.

> If "Buddhism" is "what people who call themselves 'Buddhists' do",
> then, for the most part, Buddhism is no different from any other
> theistic religion, regardless of what the sutras and sastras say.

And what would be wrong with that exactly?

> Since 9/11 we have seen a lot of Western "Buddhists" of various stripes
> opine and insist that the "Buddhist position" is X, Y, or Z. So I thought
> some of you might be interested in what a bone fide Tibetan Geshe has to say
> on the subject.

So why the gratuitous scare quotes, Dan? Surely a Western Buddhist
is a Western Buddhist, and not a Western "Buddhist". Surely, as a
"professor" you would agree that a Western Buddhist, even one who
disagrees with you, is no less bona fide than a dge-bshes, and no
less entitled to an opinion.

Also, I must have been asleep, for I have seen very few people make
claims about "the" Buddhist position. What I have seen several
people do is state how they intrepret Buddhist teachings in their
own lives. So I think you may be trying to persuade with rhetoric
rather than with accuracy and reason.

>     The result of the US actions has been that people in
> Afghanistan today are happier, and saved from violence. Not only
> them, but people in Pakistan, and India are also happier.

See, even a dge-bshes can make wild and unsupportable sweeing
generalizations about things he knows nothing about. You don't have
to be a "Western" Buddhist to do that.

>     So I support the US actions. The US has done the right thing.

Give this man a copy of Michael Moore's funny and frightening book,
Stupid White Men. I think he might find himself saying that
he supports some US actions more than others. If not, then your
dge-bshes may be, like Condoleeza Rice, an honourary stupid white
man.

> I also didn't have the heart to tell him that a vocal minority
> of buddha-l-ers have decided that his dream of liberating Tibet
> is a deluded clinging to land, nationality, and religious
> identity, based on atavistic religious myths (albeit not
> monotheistic).

You wouldn't have to refer him to any BUDDHA-L folks at all. (We'll
set aside the issue of who forms a minority or a majority here until
someone does a scientific survey.) If you want to give your learned
dge-bshes friend an alternative perspective, have him read Rodger
Kamenetz's book, The Jew in the Lotus. Here we find a Tibetan
"Buddhist" called the Dalai Lama proclaiming the bizarre view that
clingling to land and ethnic identity is completely contrary to the
principles of Buddhism. Jesus, Danny boy, I guess we'd better get
HHDL to clear things with you before shooting off his mouth, eh?

> So you are of the opinion that each and every practice that has
> ever been advertised as "buddhist" is of equal value, and that
> no practice can be erroneous or ineffective, or downright
> harmful, as long as someone calls it "buddhist"?

I think it would be presumptuous of me to say what is of value in
any sort of absolute way. It seems pretty obvious to me that some
practices that (if I may use the Quaker expression) "do no speak to
my condition" do very well in speaking to the conditions of other
people. Let them decide what is of value for themselves. Let them
decide what is harmful for themselves.

As for the label "Buddhist", it makes no difference at all to me how
it is used and by whom. It is merely a social label, like any other.
I reckon if someone wants to identify herself as a Buddhist, then no
great harm can come of that. It does not hurt her, it certainly does
not hurt me, and it even more certainly does not have any effect at
all on the Dharma itself.

I am inclined to like Naagasena's explanation of some of these
questions. When asked whether non-Buddhists have a shot at being
liberated, he replies (rightly, I think) that if anyone is striving
to reduce the amount of harm that he does to self and others,
and if anyone is striving to cultivate such mental states as
compassion and discernment and acceptance, then that person is
practising Dharma. And if one practises Dharma, then one has a shot
at being liberated.

This sort of answer, I think, leaves one quite a lot of latitude in
doing what one needs to do. It all demonstrates, I think, that one
practice that is NOT particularly useful to anyone is the practice
of passing negative judgement on the practices and beliefs of
others.

> I've encountered a number of texts that give "patience" or "patient
> forebearance" as a definition for "shanti".  What are the classic
> definitions of this term?  Does it sometimes mean simply "peace", or
> does it always have a "patience" connotation to it?

"Shanti" means peace. The word usually translated as patience or
forebearance is "kshanti". The 'k' should be pronounced fully, but
some people have a difficult time pronouncing it or pronounce it so
faintly that it ends up sounding quite a bit like shanti.

> So sorry to hear that, in order to be consistent, HHDL must have
> disavowed any support for the Free Tibet movement.

How do you get this conclusion from what I said? As I recommended
before, you really should read Rodger Kamenetz's fine book, _The Jew
in the Lotus_. The book is about a group of prominent experts in
Judaism who were invited to India to meet with HHDL, because he wished
to hear their views on how to survive in exile. There were numerous
meetings. As views were exchanged, the rabbis were astonished to learn
that the Dalai Lama was not particularly concerned with getting back
the land itself, nor was he particularly worried about Tibetans
retaining their ethnic identity abroad. What he WAS interested in was
preserving what is worth preserving in Tibetan Buddhist practices; he
was even quite willing to concede that much of Tibetan Buddhism is NOT
worth preserving. In short, HHDL was interested in preserving Dharma
rather than ethnicity and Homeland. Of course this does not mean he
has abandoned support for the Free Tibet movement (an organization
which has done very little positive other than distribute several
million bumper stickers for Hollywood celebrities and their fans to
paste on the bumpers of their BMW's).

In the summer of 2000, when I visited Jerusalem for an interfaith
conference as the representative of Buddhism (this was before Julio
had unmasked me as the most fraudulent of all fraudulent scholars on
BUDDHA-L), people there were buzzing with a remark that the Dalai Lama
had made in a recent public talk at the Elijah Institute in Jerusalem.
He had said that there would never be any hope for peace in the Middle
East until the various people there stopped being obsessed with their
ethnic identity and could give up their attachment to pieces of land.
Israeli rabbis were saying things like "He's a sweet man with a cute
giggle, but this smiling Schmuck just doesn't get Judaism at all.
Judaism is by definition being obsessed with ethnic identity. Give
that up and we give up being Jewish. Give up Israel and we give up
being Jewish. So who is this guy to tell us that we can have peace
only if we stop being Jewish?" (You'll have to imagine for yourself
all the waving of hands and the smiting of foreheads and the choking
on felafels that went on as these tirades were being delivered.)

I had reread Rodger Kamenetz's book just before going to Jerusalem.
(You probably recall Rodger, Dan. He was very active on BUDDHA-L some
time ago. You and he used to gang up on me all the time and accuse me
of anti-Semitism and neat stuff like that. But in the preface to his
book he thanked me and everyone on BUDDHA-L for helping him understand
Buddhism much better.) One of the themes in Kamenetz's book is how the
author came to realize how wide the gulf is that separates Jews from
Buddhists on certain non-negotiable core issues, such as the
importance of ethnicity and homeland. His explorations of Buddhism
caused Kamenetz to rediscover his Jewish roots, and especially the
spiritual dimensions of Buddhism. Before his meeting with HHDL,
Kamenetz was probably an example of the kind of Jew that Rabbi Barry
Levy talks about when he says that for too many modern Jews, the
Holocaust has replaced God as the focal point of the religion, and
whining about being pushed around by other people has replaced talking
to God in loving prayer. I really liked Kamenetz's book a great deal.
It was a heartfelt expression of how his encounter with Buddhism
helped him discover his Jewish spirituality (and not his Jewish
identity). And I have to say that his book helped me rediscover just
how very Buddhist I am (although, as Julio keeps reminding me in
increasingly abusive private e-mail messages, I am a complete fake and
a total disgrace to the Dharma).

> Note, the Geshe did not advocate strapping suicide bombing belts
> onto every spare hand at Dharamsala and skydiving into Beijing.

Well, that's pleasant to know. Perhaps he needs to read the book Zen
at War. It might give him some ideas in how even Buddhists can be
trained to fly airplanes into enemy ships, all in the name of
preserving the Dharma in a world gone dark with greed, hatred and
delusion.

> That final turn (guided by the criteria he articulated, viz.,
> whether more lives are saved AND whether it inceases happiness,
> i.e., decreases duhkha), which is what some seem to resist, seems
> eminently reasonable to me, as well as fully consistent with
> buddhavacana and the "saastra material that addresses this topic,
> and not rhetorical at all.

The principle sounds so good. Now if only someone could find a
reliable way to know for sure how many lives would be lost by action A
and opposed to action B, we would be able to put into practice this
noble calculus of death. Some years ago I read an interesting article
on how many lives had been "saved" as a result of bombing Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. The estimates rose every year, in direct proportion to
the estimates of how many people died in, or as a direct result of,
the atomic bomb attacks. In 1945 only 100,000 lives had been saved by
the atomic bomb, but by 1955 the figure had risen to 500,000, and by
the middle years of the Cold War almost 1,000,000 people owed their
lives to the atomic bomb.

So please send us your algorithms whereby we incipient (albeit
fraudulent) bodhisattvas can calculate how much happiness we will
create and how many lives we will save by bombing people and driving
tanks over their cars and shelling their mud huts with heavy artillery
shells as opposed to taking desperate measures such as giving them
food, water, hospitals, educational facilities and a sense of dignity.

Here is a list of countries that the USA has bombed since the end of
the second world war. Not the high percentage of these countries
that were instantly transformed from dictatorships to democracies
with the help of Uncle Sam's petards.

        China 1945-46
        Korea 1950-53
        China 1950-53
        Guatemala 1954
        Indonesia 1958
        Cuba 1959-60
        Guatemala 1960
        Congo 1964
        Peru 1965
        Laos 1964-73
        Vietnam 1961-73
        Cambodia 1969-70
        Guatemala 1967-69
        Grenada 1983
        Libya 1986
        El Salvador 1980s
        Nicaragua 1980s
        Panama 1989
        Iraq 1991-99
        Sudan 1998
        Afghanistan 1998
        Yugoslavia 1999
        Afghanistan 2002
        Iraq 2003

Applying what I know of Buddhist logic to this evidence, I seem to
detect a vyaapti relationship, namely, that being bombed by the USA
is invariably followed by a failure to establish a government with a
robust interest in human rights and freedoms. The question a
Dharmakiirti would wish to ask is this: Is bombing the CAUSE of the
failure to establish a humane and/or deomcratic government, or is
it a pure fluke that bombing has not led to the expected results in
these twenty-four cases? How might one go about answering his
question?

> from a middle way between hawks and doves,
> Dan Lusthaus

God Almighty, Dan, if you're representing the Middle, I'd hate like
hell to meet a hawk.

> He didn't say that the Afghanis, et al., were happy "with the
> way the US has chosen to fight," but rather that as a result of
> the US actions, they are happier.

Oh, I see. So he was probably referring to the US policy to export
tobacco products and reruns of Dallas to third-world countries. My
mistake. Given the general topic, and given that your message was
entitled "A Geshe on terrorism", I rashly assumed the "US actions"
all these Afghanis, Pakistanis and Indians are reportedly happy with
had something to do with the still-undeclared "war" the White
House is waging on what it chooses to call terrorism.

> Some Tibetans will have to construct a diaspora-proof
> religio-ethnic identity, while others will blend into general
> populations retaining, at most some ethnic identification, and
> eventually no identification

The latter group, those who eventually have no identification, will
have achieved an important Buddhist desideratum, and,
simultaneously, they will be able to participate fully in the
American dream, which includes melting into the larger population
without carrying unnecessary ethnic labels. I wish these Tibetans
all the best in losing their ethnic identities and just becoming
generic human beings.

> (like North Americans who say they have a
> great-great-grandmother who was part Cherokee).

All eight of my great-great grandmothers were English, I'm afraid.
They were also all Protestants. But I would never identify myself as
English or as a Protestant. Why should I? I have spent only two
weeks in England, and all I got was a bad cold and a sense of horror
at all the destruction done by Puritans to magnificent cathedrals.
I'm a human being, not a wasp.

> There will be tension between the groups tending in each
> direction.

More's the pity. But you are right. This is the lot of most
immigrant populations for the first couple of generations. But
they'll eventually get over it as they learn to love pizza, chop
suey and other American foods. And just wait until they discover
that Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis could do much more interesting
things with a horn than those cacophonous bla-mas ever dreamed of
doing.

> Actually, this thread has suggested to me that a book needs to be
> written titled "Buddhist Violence" documenting historically and
> doctrinally Buddhist participation in violence

I think such books are being written already. Mention has already been
made of Zen At War. I agree that making Buddhists aware of
violence that has gone on in the name of Buddhism would be a
corrective to the naive view that not a single drop of blood has ever
been shed in the name of religion by Buddhists. Sadly enough, that
claim is just plain false, as we both know. So if the aim is to give
an historically accurate record of how people calling themselves
Buddhists have acted down through the ages, such a book might have
some historical value.

As for the philosophical issues around war and violence, that has been
discussed at considerable length on BUDDHA-L in previous years,
especially during the Gulf War. At that time we heard quite a lot from
Buddhists who favoured the US participation in that war, and we also
heard quite a lot from people who felt that US force was unwarranted
in that situation.

> This violence thing, which seems to have no problem eliciting all
> sorts of anger and rejection (pratigha) from otherwise peaceful
> Western Buddhists (no scare quotes), appears to be the latest taboo.

This does not correspond at all to my observations. I have seen no
evidence at all that discussions of violence are taboo. Both on
BUDDHA-L and the now-defunct BUDDHIST list there have been numerous
discussions on how *mights* might think about the phenomena of war, the
death penalty, gun control and various other topics that deal with
violence. I have also seen a great deal of discussion about such
matters on the various Buddhist news groups, such as
talk.religion.buddhism. Whatever else the topic may be, it is
certainly not taboo.

> As the quote from Kuiji's commentary on the Heart Sutra that I
> posted closer to 9/11, and the quote from William's book, and
> countless other passages one could quote illustrate, the Buddhist
> position on violence is not simplistic pacifism, nor are such
> opinions expressed by texts and Geshes aberrations.

I think we all know that. Those examples have been cited again and
again over the years. They are the favourites of those who wish to
argue for something like a Buddhist equivalent of an Augustinian
doctrine of Just War. (I have long though that George Bush and his
unfortunate son W. were interested in just war, or at least just
interested in war. But that's an aside.) Those who do not favour war
or violent intervention also have their favourite passages. This all
goes to show that Buddhists, like their Christian and Jewish and
Muslim brothers, are divided on the issue of war, and everyone can
plunder scripture for their favourite "proof" texts.

> Perhaps developing a thoughtful, Buddhist ethic of violence will be
> our task in the 21st century.

A thoughtful defense of war is a contradiction in terms. But if that
is how you'd like to use your time and talents, please go ahead and
write such a book. Hell, you could even do another translation of
Kautilya's Artha-s'aastram, which some scholars have claimed was
written by a Buddhist. That fine fellow recommends using monks as
spies, because people tend to trust them and confide in them. To a
good Buddhist monk, "All is fair in ... war." (Monks aren't allowed
to love.)

As for myself, I have to say that although I have many criticisms of
Gandhi, I still find myself in agreement with his statement "There
are causes I would die for, but I have yet to see a cause that I
would kill for." Even Gandhi's old sparring partner B.R. Ambedkar
agreed with the Mahatma on this point. I have yet to become aware
of a single episode in the history of the human race that seemed to
me to warrant the deliberate and premeditated taking of someone's
life. I'm afraid I find the very idea of just war risible. If that
offends thee, then shoot me.

>> Calls it Buddhist because it leads to awakening.
>
> If you can point out someone alive today who is "awakened" (whatever that
> might mean), then we can ask them what practices they did.

No need to find someone who is awakened. It would suffice to find
someone who has become more harmonious, less judgemental, more
tranquil, more accepting, less distraught and more at home in his
skin. If you can find someone like that, then you have found someone
who is heading in exactly the direction that the Buddha indicated. And
you can then ask what that person has done to make progress in the
right direction.

When you were asked whether you had explored the various practices for
which you have expressed a degree of contempt, you said:

> Sounds like a good way to get nothing done.

If exploring practices that others have found useful to themselves is
a waste of your time, then surely it is an even greater waste of your
time to express contempt for practices you have not even bothered to
explore.

> I find most interesting the practices that are plausibly the ones
> actually taught by the Buddha: Four Foundations of Mindfulness and
> the like.

These those are what you should do. And you might add one of the other
practices that he frequently recommended, which is the practice of
withholding expressions of aversion about the practices of others.

> "To be free of all authority, of your own and that of another, is to
> die to everything of yesterday, so that your mind is always fresh,
> always young, innocent, full of vigour and passion. It is only in
> that state that one learns and observes."

If you really hold to that statement of Krishnamurti's, then I should
think you would get over your clinging to certain practices simply
because some authority figure has told you they were taught by the
Buddha and being suspicious of others because you assume they were not
taught by the Buddha. Consider doing this: Just let your mind die to
all those things of yesterday (such as the tired sayings of
Krishnamurti), and go out with your young, innocent, vigorous and
passionate mind to explore practices that might supplement and
complement the tiny handful you have already found useful.

> The previous post by me was quite clear, any suggestion that
> Buddha was sexually involved with anyone is offensive. [material
> deleted] The idea that Buddha possessed defilements leading to any
> sexual identity is offensive. The assertion that the Buddha
> possessed defilements is offensive.


Malcolm, I just can't seem to get offended by these ideas. I believe
they are probaby inaccurate, but why on earth would anyone regard
inaccuracy about such things as offensive?

> Perhaps we could take this question to a more abstract level, and
> just look at whether or not it is possible to be gay and become
> enlightened.

Talking about enlightenment always make me a little nervous. It
signals to me that people are beginning to get distracted from
issues of importance. Van Morrison got it right when he wrote:

        Enlightenment, don't know what it is
        I say it's non-attachment

So please permit to rephrase your question in Buddhist terms: "Is it
possible to be gay and non-attached?" The answer to this, it seems,
will be about the same as the answers to these two questions: 1) Is
it possible to be sexual and still be non-attached? 2) Is it
possible to assume any identity at all and still be non-attached?

Now in talking about non-attachment, I think it is important to bear
in mind why non-attachment is considered by Buddhists to be a good
thing to cultivate. Non-attachment is good only because dukkha is
not what we want, and attachment tends to lead to dukkha.

I have some very good news for you, James. There is a way to be
attached and get away with. There is no doubt that attachment leads
to all kinds of attachment, but if one knows that in advance and
agrees to take the dukkha on, then the dukkha is much less severe
than if it comes unexpected. If, for example, you love someone who
has the unfortunate character defect of being mortal, then you can
be sure she is going to die someday. And you know it will hurt when
she dies. But if you agree to accept that dukkha when the time
comes, then it cannot ambush you. You just take when it comes, in
just the same way you take the end of a period of peaceful
meditation when it comes. (Go see the movie "Shadowlands" again and
reflect on what C.S. Lewis's wise wife said to him: "The pain then
is part of the happiness now. That's the deal.")

> I have trouble understanding the relationship of experience and
> enlightenment

If you become attached to experiences and weep and gnash your teeth
when they end, that is not enlightenment. If you have good or bad
experiences and move on to others when they come to an end, then
that is about as close to enlightenment as one needs to get.

> My feeling is that the basic percept is the same, but the
> difference is that an enlightened person is not attached to the
> percept, doesn't either grasp it or reject it.

Exactly. There is nothing more to be said about this really. It is
just a matter of learning to have experiences without being attached
to them. Or maybe it is not a matter of learning at all. Maybe it is
just a matter of getting old and mellow.

> Similarly, it should be possible to have a sexual experience
> percept with or without grasping.

It is quite a bit easier for most people to SAY they have sexual
experiences without attachment than for them actually to have sexual
experiences without attachment.

> I generally follow the personal guideline that since I am not
> enlightened yet, I don't understand anything about Buddhism
> correctly and accurately.

That is not a very useful guideline, I think. Hell, anyone can
understand pretty much everything of importance in Buddhism. It's
just that people who have strong attachments are not very good yet
at putting that understanding into practise. The problem is not that
people don't understand Buddhist teachings but that they don't want
them to be true.

Now, since it's a beautiful day outside, I'm going to go ride my
bicycle down by the Rio Grande and watch the ducks and geese. I may
even indulge in some attchment to the beauty of the river. But I'll
do my best to take the pain of separation like a man. (If I fail,
I promise to whimper.)

> Is the fourth Immaterial State, the base consisting of neither
> perception nor non-perception, something the Buddha could reasonably
> have expected at least some of his hearers to partly understand, or
> is it merely a category of Hindu logic that no ordinary
> unenlightened person could possibly understand?

It is explained in a way that I find easy to understand. The state is not
perception, because at the time one is in it, there is no awareness of
anything at all. The state is not non-perception, because it leaves a
subliminal trace such that after it is over, one can recall having been in
it. This makes it different in rather important ways from being dead.

> A nonverbal concept is so subtle that one could call it something
> not perceived, yet not nothing at all either.

I think that is second jhaana. That is quite a bit different from neither
perepction nor non-perception.

> First, it is necessary to distinguish the nonverbal aspect of a
> concept from the verbal aspect of the same concept.

I really don't want to talk about it.

> For example, one can recognize that something is a flower, and
> understand something about it, even if one doesn't think or speak
> the word "flower".

This is second jhaana.

> It is conceivable that the enlightenment might involve a concept
> that includes everything in the universe as exemplars of it.

Enlightenment, I suppose, is not so much a matter of having concepts
of either the the verbal or non-verbal variety as it is a matter of
not being attached to whatever concepts and percepts may happen to
arise.

> Would it be accurate to say you believe that the entire Buddhist
> tradition is a literary creation that has nothing to do with any
> actual teachings of a historical figure called "Buddha"?

Not quite. I simply think the issue of histority does not matter at
all. What we have is stories about someone who was alleged to be a
buddha. We have many such stories. In most of them the character
called a buddha asks questions, gives advice and so on. Not all of
it suits everyone. It is therefore the task of each individual to
experiment with the various teachings and to settle on those that
work best for him or her.

> The alternative is not that everything ascribed to the Buddha is
> literally true either, but rather that some of it is likely to go
> back to his teachings, while other material is likely much later
> in origin.

I can't imagine what possible difference it could make to anyone
what the origin of a teaching is. Have you ever heard of the genetic
fallacy? It is a fallacy consisting in the assumption that by
knowing how something began, one can know whether it is true.

> Some of this later material and practices may originate in
> speculation, superstition and the power-consolidation strategies
> of monks/lamas, rather than in an honest attempt to eliminate
> suffering. Do you find this possibility out of the question?

I find such considerations completely irrelevant. The question is
whether the teachings are good. And I reckon they are good if they
help at least some people reduce greed, hatred, delusion, pride,
arrogance and the obsession to find fault with others.

> I think there are two "easy ways out" here: one is to say, as you
> seem to, that since its impossible to know what the Buddha
> actually said or taught, anything goes as long as it makes you
> feel good.

No, it is not a matter of feeling good. It is a matter of refining
one's mentality by getting rid of, at least reducing, greed, hatred,
delusion and numerous other afflictions. Being more refined does not
always make one feel good, although it does tend in that direction.

> The "middle path" is to recognize that, yes, we have no written
> records that originate any earlier than 4 or 5 centuries after the
> historical Buddha (assuming here that there is one), but
> acknowledge that it is possible to establish earlier and later
> material, material that *is more likely* to go back to the
> historical Buddha, and material that is *more likely* literary
> creation from much later times. Or do you dismiss historical
> scholarship as chasing chimeras?

I do not dismiss historical scholarship. I just think the results of
such scholarship have very little bearing on the practical efficacy
of practices.

> If there >was< a historical Buddha, and he >did< have a unique
> realization under the Bodhi tree, and he >did< teach to try to
> pass this on to his fellow sentient beings, then: there are
> certain teachings and practices that he actually >did< teach and
> there are others that he did >not< teach, but were "made up" later
> and attributed to him retroactively.

Quite possibly. But it does not follow from the fact that a teaching
may have been made up by someone other than the historical buddha
that the teaching is of no value in helping people reduce greed,
hatred, delusion and judgementalism.

> A) it is impossible to establish what these original teachings
> were, or B) it is possible to establish what is >more likely< his
> actual teachings.

C) It is also possible to think too much about matters that have no
bearing on the task at hand.

> However, if one is serious about eliminating suffering for self
> and others, then speculations and entertainment can be a
> distraction.

True, they can be at least as distracting as worrying about whether
a teaching was really taught by the Buddha or by someone later who
was only very good at helping people get rid of greed, hatred and
delusion.

> I don't see how one can reconcile the clear warnings against
> metaphysical speculation attributed to the Buddha with the reams
> of exactly that (metaphysical speculations) that came later in the
> tradition.

What is there to reconcile? There are no warnings against
metaphysics in Buddhist teachings. What there are warnings against
is becoming attached to only one way of seeing things. If one
becomes attached to a particular practice and believes it is
uniquely effective and that all others are useless, then it is a
form of bondage. It says so right in the Sutta-nipaata. So if one is
serious about practising dharma, it would do well to be wary of the
subtle bondage of denigrating the practices of others.

>> There, the claim is that Dzogchen meditation involves directly
>> seeing the real nature while Theravada and other meditations are
>> still involved with samsara.
>
> If the "real nature" is not "involved" with samsara, then were is
> it? I agree with Nagarjuna (and the Buddha as found in the Pali
> texts) on this point. One might argue that the Dzogchenites have
> reified mental events.

A couple of days ago there was a faint tapping at the glass door in
the dining room. Standing outside the door there was a roadrunner
proudly holding a lizard in his beak. His crest was raised in
arousal. For several minutes he kept coming up to the glass, tapping
it, backing away and dancing around in tight little courtship
circles. Finally, crestfallen, he went away, a decidedly puzzled and
discouraged young fellow. I went outside and looked at the glass
door and saw that the lighting conditions were such that the glass
door was in effect a mirror. It was impossible to see through it;
one could see only one's own reflection. The poor roadrunner had
been courting himself. For some reason, the entire episode struck me
as an apt metaphor for how many of us go about the spiritual life.
(You can imagine how much Schadenfreude it brings an old coyote's
heart to see a roadrunner making such an ass of himself. But I
divagate.)

I am inclined to agree, Bruce, with the words I am putting in your
mouth when you almost say that a rdzogs-chen-pa who feels a need to
denigrate a Theravadin, who is doing pretty much exactly the same
thing as the rdzogs-chen-pa, is acting a little bit like a
roadrunner with a lizard in his beak. "Hey, lookie here what I got
hanging out of the corner of my mind: a clear light of bliss and a
whopping helping of bodhicitta. Pretty neat, eh?"

This tendency to try to downgrade those who are just about identical
to oneself is not much different from the male peacock dancing
around with his feathers all a-bristle saying "Choose me! I've got
something that none of these other pathetic specimens around here
have!" It all goes to show just how persistent asmitaa
(self-absorption, literally I-am-ness) can be, and how far into
one's spiritual practise it can endure.

I can't help wondering if there might not be a touch of the
roadrunner in the mirror also when some of our friends express at
least a degree of shock and outrage at the very idea that the Buddha
may have had affection for, perhaps even sexual interest in, some of
the men and women in his life. Why is such an idea offensive?
Perhaps because of a subtle (or not so subtle) prejudice in favour
of those who stand alone like a rhinoceros horn rather than dare the
risks of intimacy?

Why, I wonder, does this assumption that intimacy is inimical to
enlightenment so often go unchallenged in Buddhist circles? Why, for
example, could the Buddha not have been like Roshi Robert Aitken and
his lovely wife (whose name, I am ashamed to have to say, slips my
mind, so that I can only think of her as Mrs Roshi). Now there is
one of the most wonderful couples I have had the good fortune to
meet, a pair of people who work together, practise together, and
help one another become ever more refined and polished. Each of them
reflects the nobility in the other's soul. I have known several
couples like that. Why could one not imagine Gotama and Ambapali as
such a couple? Or even the Buddha and Ananda? (I am not saying this
as an historical possibility but as a mythological possibility.)

Somehow I just can't help thinking that if the Buddha had had a
lover, he and his partner would have been a magnificent pair of
witnesses to the power of love and caring and sharing. They would be
two people with a single heart of mettaa, just as some of the famous
pairs and threesomes of monks described their friendships with their
closest companions. Sexuality between such friends as that can never
be offensive, because such people are truly forming a bond, rather
than using each other merely as sources of imperfectly reiprocated
admiration. There may be a subtle difference between looking deeply
into the eyes of a like-hearted lover to see the endlessness of
bodhicitta, and prancing in front of a mirror to admire one's
trophies. It is, at least, worth reflecting upon.

> I won't say you're wrong, because you could be right that everything about
> Buddhism is easy to understand.

Not everything about Buddhism is easy to understand. It is, for
example, difficult to understand why so many people mystify all the
really important Buddhist issues, which are quite simple to grasp.
Do you recall the story of how for seven weeks after the Buddha's awakening
he was disinclined to teach. The reason he gave for his reticence was not
that he had discovered something so profound that people could not
understand it. Rather, the reason he gave was that people are so steeped in
their attachments that they would be unwilling to give them up. The problem
as he saw it was not one of grasping, but one of will. People do not WILL to
free themselves.

> There
> is a difference between an  intellectual understanding that attachment keeps
> one in Samsara, and understanding this in a way that tells one exactly how to
> get rid of that attachment, so that in practice, one can do it.

Here again I would say that the problem is not that people lack the
understanding. Rather, they fear the unfamiliar. Being unfamiliar with
freedom from attchment, they are afraid to go there. They keep wondering
things like "Will my wife accept my lack of attachment toward her? Will she
still make me breakfast on the morning after I become an arhant?"

> If everyone understands Buddhism so well, then they understand why
> enlightenment is better.

Yes, they do understand. But they lack the courage to live in accordance
with what they so easily understand.

> If one really understood that, then one would want
> to become enlightened.

It takes more than understanding. It takes will. Will does not always
following the dictates of the understanding. Look, everyone in the world
understands that peace is a lot better than war. We all know that. But what
we lack is the will to cahnge those familiar patterns of behaviour that keep
conflicts going.

People often say that the root cause of all afflictions is
ignorance, which may make it sound like a cognitive problem. It
might help to think of ignorance not as an absence of knowing but as
the active presence of ignoring, willfully refusing to acknowledge
what all easily we know is true.

All the recent talk about being offended by innocent questions
brings to mind some of my favourite verses from Shantideva. (I trust
it will not offend our good friend Dante Rosati that I cite a texts
he finds so repugnant.) These verses occur in Bodhicaryaavataara
chapter 6.

*****

pratimaastuupasaddharmanaa"sakaakro"sake.su ca |
na yujyate mama dve.so buddhaadiinaa.m na hi vyathaa || 64||

My hatred toward destroyers of idols and reliquaries and those who
revile the true dharma is unfitting, since the buddhas and so on
have no anguish over these things.

gurusaalohitaadiinaa.m priyaa.naa.m caapakaari.su |
puurvavatpratyayotpaada.m d.r.s.tvaa kopa.m nivaarayet || 65||

On seeing the arising of conditions in those who abuse beloved
teachers, relatives and so on, one should turn anger aside.

cetanaacetanak.rtaa dehinaa.m niyataa vyathaa |
saa vyathaa cetane d.r.s.taa k.samasvainaa.m vyathaamata.h || 66||

Distress, whether it is caused by conscious beings or by unconscious
beings, is inevitable for embodied beings. That distress is observed
in the mind. Therefore, endure it.

mohaad eke.aparaadhyanti kupyantyanye vimohitaa.h |
bruuma.h kame.su nirdo.sa.m ka.m vaa bruumo.aparaadhinam || 67||

Some people are offensive because of delusion; others, perplexed,
grow angry. Whom among them do we call without fault? Whom do we
call offensive?

eva.m buddhvaa tu pu.nye.su tathaa yatna.m karomyaham |
yena sarve bhavi.syanti maitracittaa.h parasparam || 69||

But understanding this I shall strive for virtuous things so that
all shall have friendly thoughts for one another.

> That is an intelligent explanation, probably motivated by a desire
> to avoid paradox.

I have no idea what motivated the explanation. Since it is the
explanation attributed to the Buddha himself, one can presume that
the motivation was to explain an important matter as cledarly as
possible.

> However, paradox is part of the discourse of all mystical
> traditions, so needs to be dealt with.

First I suppose we should ascertain whether Buddhism is a mystical
tradition. I see no evidence for such a claim. Do you?

> However, it does seem that the Buddha probably meant the paradox.

Now I'll have to ask to see some evidence.

> First, this was said in the context of Hindu logic, which has four
> categories (rather than the Western two), true, false, both true
> and false, and neither true nor false.

There is no such thing as Hindu logic. There is just logic. The
logic used by Indias is exactly like the logic used by the Greeks
and those who followed them. In ancient India it was customary to
ask four questions. The first was "Is it the case that A is P?" For
example, one might say "Is Devadatta a human being?" The second is
"Is it the case that A is not P?" "Is Devadatta not a human being?"
These two questions take straightforward answers; in our example,
the first is answered yes, the second no.

Now some matters are more complex than that. So one might ask a
questions such as "Is A both P and not P?" This means: is A in some
respects (or ssometimes) P and in some respects (or sometimes) not
P? An example of a question of this form might be "Is Devadatta
drunk or not drunk?" The answer to the third question might
therefore be that Devadatta is sometimes drunk but is usually sober.

Now there is a fourth kind of question, one in which the subject
does not exist at all. Then neither a predicate nor its
contradictory applies. An example of this sort of question might be
"Is the president of Kansas a smoker or a non-smoker?" Since Kansas
has o president, there is no one to whom the predicates smoker or
non-smoker can be applied.

This method of asking four questions is rather cumbersome, but its
purpose was to clarify whether a simple answer could be given or
whether only a complex answer could be given or whether no answer at
all could be given without being misleading.

> In addition, if the Buddha had meant two separate
> experiences/processes, separated by time, he would probably have
> discussed this time factor thoroughly and repeatedly.

He did. The explanation is the one I originally reported.

> For example, below the level of the jhanas, Visuddhimagga, IV, 31,
> describes the counterpart sign of the earth kasina as "it has
> neither color nor shape".

That's right. It's a pure idea in the mind. Ideas do not have colour or
shape.

> That is parallel to a nonverbal concept as well as neither
> perception nor non-perception. For the second jhana, the stilling
> of applied and sustained thought may imply something subtle
> somewhat like the nonverbal concept.

But this is not called the state of neither perception nor
non-perception. That is a very different state from second jhaana.
What you are talking about with all this verbal and non-verbal stuff
is really just second jhaana.

> You are fundamentally right in terms of the normal interpretation
> of Buddhism, and I am not proposing an alternative.

Good, because there is no need for any alternative to the normal
interpretation. If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it. (Of course
if it does break, then do your best to fix it. But in this case, I
think your fixing may be doing more damage than good.)

> Just curious. Are kasina meditation mentioned in the Tipitaka? Are these
> practise found in other traditions also?

Someone could either give you a fish or teach you how to fish. What I
recommend is that you get a copy of the CD-ROM version of the Pali canon
and all its commentaries and the Visuddhimaggo and its commentaries. It is
available for about $5 from the Goenka folks. If you install that, you can
ask it thousands of questions just like this. You can even get it to spit
the canon at you in the script of your choice: Thai, Burmese, Sinhala,
Cambodian, Devanagari or Roman. It also comes with a dictionary. It's the
best investment of $5 you'll ever make.

And here's the best part: if you leave the CD-ROM in your CD-drive, your
computer becomes a Dharma wheel spinning the entire Pali canon several
thousand times a minute. With all the merit you can accumulate by doing
that, you'll probably have just enough to be reborn in Arkansas in your
next birth.

Good look in finding a copy of the Pali canon on CD-ROM and finding out
whether kasinas were talked about in the canonical texts. (It will take
you about ten seconds to search the entire corpus of Pali canonical and
commentarial literature for this word.)

> I find (or observe) an attacking action to be offensive without
> having a mental factor of 'being offended' arising. ...[elided
> material]... I also regard the allegations as offensive. The
> mental factor arising in my mind is one of sorrow. The sorrow is
> that such allegations could tend to distance someone from the good
> qualities of the Buddha.

This is where I remain as baffled as I was at the outset. The issue
for me has had nothing whatsoever to do with speculating about
whether any individual was offended. I see no point at all in
guessing about the mental conditions of others.

For me the issue has been the VERY IDEA that someone would regard
any suggestion that the Buddha could have had lovers, either male or
female, as an attack on the Buddha. Even if one were to say that the
Buddha is by definition a celibate monk and that it is therefore
erroneous to suggest that he was not celibate, I would still say
that such a claim would at best be erroneous, a simple mistake.
There is, I think, a vast difference between being mistaken about a
fact and making an attack.

I just cannot manage to find a way of looking at the issue of the Buddha's
possible sexuality that seems to me in any sense an attack on his
character. Would he have been any less a man if he had had a string of
male and female lovers? Would he have been any less a Buddha? To my mind,
the answer is quite clearly No! It would not have made the four noble
truths any less valid. It would not make wisdom or compassion any less
worthy of pursuit. It would not make the Buddha even a millimetre less
tall in my mind. It would not give him any less integrity in any way
whatsoever. It would necessarily mean he had afflictions. (Sexuality is an
affliction only if one is afflicted by it or inflicts it unwillingly on
others.)

Therefore, I would still have to say that it takes some deliberate effort
to find this question offensive in any of the normal uses of the word. I
don't think one can find this issue offensive unless one is looking for
something to be offended about. And to do that might betray a temporary
and remediable lapse in one's applications of the very principles
rticulated by the Buddha that make him worthy of our respect.

> There is no problem at all with having an aversion to what is
> defiled or conducive to what spreads defilement.

So by you sexuality is a defilement? And that's why it's offensive
to speak of a Buddha as a sexual being?

> In fact, it is appropriate to have an aversion to defilement,
> that's how one develops renunciation.

Right, it's appropriate to have aversion to greed, hatred, delusion,
emotional rigidity and fanaticism. But to sexuality?

> The Bhik.su rules were formulated entirely because of various
> instances where monks would engage in behavior the Buddha found
> censurable.

You seem not to have read the commentaries to the vinaya rules very
carefully. The rules for bhikkhus were formulated not because the
Buddha found certain actions offensive, but because the lay people
would not give alms to people who did not meet their expectations of
what holiness and good etiquette consists in. Most of the vinaya
rules (aside those having to do with pretty universal taboos such as
murder, theft and deceit) were responses to the puritanical
reactions of potential donors. If the Buddha and his followers had
not been at the mercy of the generosity of strangers, the vinaya
code would be very different. And if the vinaya had evolved in
Kamakura Japan or modern California, it would be a very different
body of rules than if it had evolved in modern Africa or modern Utah
or medieval Caledonia. Forgetting just how culturally specific the
vinaya is can lead to some rather strange attitudes about what
Buddhism is about. Then the sad-dharma becomes a sad dharma indeed.

> Some of the reasons for banning such behaviors, simply put, were
> based upon such behaviors being offensive and undignified conduct.

No behaviour is intrinsically offensive. Behaviour is deemed
offensive by particular people at particular times.

> In theory having two or three moderators on duty ought to make
> matters more efficient. Each moderator should receive a copy of
> all posts submitted and be able to forward them to the list. If
> two moderators both happen to forward the same post, then the
> earlier forwarding is accepted and the later one is ignored.

That is what I thought would happen when I read the official
Listserv owner's manual. What is actually happening is that the
messages are being sent out to one moderator at a time on a rotation
basis. If the first moderator to whom a message is sent does not
reply within a specified period, then the message is sent to a
second moderator for approval. (I know this is happening, because I
have seen many messages distributed that I did not see as a
moderator. But one message that I decided not to approve was
approved the next day by one of the other moderators.)

The current method of moderation cuts down on the amount of mail
that each moderator gets. This is good for the moderators,
especially on a heavy day. (Last week we had more than 50 messages
in one day! Imagine how much work or meditation a moderator would
get if he had to approve all fifty single-handedly.)

The current arrangement does break up the pace of conversations,
which I think is a good thing. In a perfect universe, each of us
would read out BUDDHA-L mail once a day and send in only
well-considered replies to two or three of yesterday's messages.
(But in a perfect universe there would also be no irregular verbs in
English. The past tense of think would be thinked instead of
thought, and the past tense of dump would be dumped instead of
damp.)

> I suspect the LISTSERV software may need some fine-tuning.

I'll read the manual again to see if fine-tuning can be done. But
first I have to finish writing an article before the deadline police
fine me for being dilatory. Meanwhile, I think it may be a good
thing that the flow of discussions is being slowed down. Everything
is this world is just too damn fast, and if Buddhists have anything
at all to contribute to this world, it's the gift of slowness.

>> So by you sexuality is a defilement? And that's why it's offensive
>> to speak of a Buddha as a sexual being?
>
> I accept Vasubandhu's definition of defilement, which includes all
> conditioned things apart from path dharmas.

You have not answered the question. According to your definition of
defilement, which is standard and which I also accept, is sexuality
necessarily defiled?

> Sexual actions are almost always a result of desire ['dod chags,
> raga], except where they are motivated by malice, such as
> instances of rape; desire is a defilement.

Not all desire is a defilement. The desire to be harmonious, the
desire to increase feelings of friendship and community, the desire
to be tranquil and to make others feel at home are all considered
virtues and need not be seen as defilements at all. Sexually MAY be
the result of self-centred lust, but it is not necessarily so.

> Actions predicated on defilement *always* produce suffering, no
> matter how slight such suffering may seem.

So now I have to ask you: does sexuality, in your opinion, *always*
produce suffering? Would you accept the testimony of people who
would tell you that sexuality need not produce any suffering at all,
even subtle suffering? Or would you dismiss such testimony as the
raving of deluded fools, because it apparently disagrees with
Vasubandhu?

> It is always appropriate to have an aversion to actions predicated
> on defilements.

On this we agree completely. But we must now ask whether in your
opinion sexuality is invariably driven by defiled intentions. And if
that is your opinion, on what do you base it?

> Buddha found behavior offensive to lay people censurable. Note that I
> did not state that what the Buddha found censurable he also found
> offensive.

Now you are simply quibbling. The issue is this: why did the Buddha
issue so many vinaya rules that seem frankly petty and trivial? I
respectfully submit that it was because he knew he had to comply
with what lay people in his culture at his time expected of
mendicants. Now we all know the Buddha's saasana was conditioned by
his culture. But we live in a very different culture. Things that
were considered offensive by laity in his time are not usually
considered offensive by modern people in the West. And so I wonder
where we need to be locked into finding offensive behaviour that is
not considered censurable by people today. Are we not allowed to ask
questions such as this: if the Buddha were living today, would he
necessarily be celibate?

>> No behaviour is intrinsically offensive. Behaviour is deemed
>> offensive by particular people at particular times.
>
> Agreed, and had the Buddha lived 70 more years, there would have been
> many more vows that the present 200 + depending on what order one
> belongs to.

The only evidence we have is that there would have been far fewer
rules. Don't forget that the principal issue that drove Devadatta to
try to gain control over the bhikkhu sangha was that he thought
Gotama was becoming too lax. And don't forget that in his final
days, Gotama told Aananda that the minor rules could be dispensed
with. So perhaps if the Buddha had lived another seventy years, he
might have finally figured out that the vinaya could be reduced to
just one rule: Play nice.

> BTW, I disagree with you; defiled behaviors are intrinsically
> offensive, for example, lying, etc. They are offensive because
> they hurt both the recipient of a lie, and the person telling the
> lie.

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. If the intention behind any
action is to harm another (or even to gain a good at the risk of
harming another), then the action is defiled. I have already allowed
that there are some actions that are pretty well universally
regarded as offensive. Sexuality is not among them. So I don't think
that we can begin by acknowledging that deceiving others in order to
cheat them or win their approval is universally deemed offensive and
end by concluding that sexuality is intrinsically offensive.

> I find the suffering of others, and myself, offensive, and wish
> strongly that none of us will suffer.

Naturally. What reasonable person would wish any different? But tell
me: does this mean you wish strongly that none of us would be
sexually active? Is it sexual activity that you find defiled and
therefore offensive, or is it something else, something that has
nothing whatsoever to do with sexuality? (Please forgive me for
being so persistent in trying to understand why anyone would regard
a sincere question about the Buddha's sexuality in some way
offensive.)

> I can't imagine that anyone could define their sexuality apart
> from those to which they find themselves desiring to have sexual
> contact with.

Yes, that goes without saying. But the issue is whether desiring to
have sexual contact with another person is necessarily an instance
of an intoxicant (aas'rava) doing its work. I can easily imagine
someone having a sexual interest in a loved one in a way that is not
in the least a source of dukkha or frustration or any other
unwholesome dharma.

> I also cannot imagine sexuality as a "path dharma" outside of the
> very specific context of Vajrayana, which itself absolutely
> requires a formal dependent origination between master and
> disciple [via empowerment], a suitable partner of equivalent
> realization; or in the case of a passionless bodhisattva for whom
> sexual activity is part of the perfection of giving.

If sexuality can be a path dharma under those conditions, then it
can also be a path dharma between two people who have cultivated
mettaa and dedicated all their energy to cultivating wholesome
mental states. The Vajrayana context you describe is just a
formalization, a churchification if you will, of such a situation.

>> Not all desire is a defilement...Sexually MAY be
>> the result of self-centred lust, but it is not necessarily so.
>
> Apples and oranges; specifically I am discussing 'dod chags, raga,
> i.e. desire for sense objects, which I understand as a necessary
> prerequisite for normal sexual conduct.

This afternoon I watched some ducks mating. Three male ducks chased
a female around the pond for a while, until one of the males grabbed
her by the neck and pushed her under water while another male
mounted her. Then the top of her head was passed to the male duck
who had mounted her. She was completely submerged. Every twenty
seconds or so he pulled her head above the water and let her take a
gasp of air before he pushed her head under water again. After two
or three minutes, the first drake dismounted and a second mounted
and repeated the entire procedure. And then the third. I could not
help thinking the entire venture was not very satisfying for the
female duck. And I thought to myself, now THAT is 'dod chags
(raaga). And how very different that is from the tender and caring
love-making that goes on between two people who are strong
practitioners of dharma, in which there is not even a subtle sense
of coercion, no violation of boundaries and no attachments of the
sort that produce dukkha for self and/or others.

> A first stage bodhisattva may be sexually active without desire, I
> suppose, but then, not having desire, how could they really be
> understood to have sexuality?

Forgot all that first stage bodhisattva stuff. Just think about
ordinary human beings who are serious enough as practitioners that
they are loving and deeply sensitive to the thoughts and feelings of
others. Such couples may have sex but not in ways that lead to
emotional dependence and addiction and all the dissatisfaction that
ride in the train of defilements.

>> So now I have to ask you: does sexuality, in your opinion, *always*
>> produce suffering? Would you accept the testimony of people who
>> would tell you that sexuality need not produce any suffering at all,
>
> I would state that they have not accepted the Shariputra's discussion
> about the three types of suffering.

Very well, but you still have not answered my question. Would you
accept the testimony of people who disagreed with S'aaripuutra?

> I would only observe that an assertion such as you suppose above
> is inconsistent because a sexuality is predicated, by definition,
> upon whom one is naturally disposed to desire for sexual
> satisfaction.

Do you put more faith in the formal definitions of scholastics than
is the reality of experience?

> To recap, sexuality cannot be defined apart from those to which
> one finds one's self desiring to have sexual contact with. Having
> eliminated all defilements of desire, one no longer has a
> sexuality of which to speak.

True, one may choose not to speak about the sexuality that one has
after getting rid of all pernicious desire (and I must repeat that
according to all the Buddhists I have ever studied, not all desire
is pernicious). Some desires (whether you use the word raaga or
chanda or kaama) are quite positive, because they lead to happiness,
fulfillment, joy and tranquility; others are negative, because they
involve either a direct intention to harm others or at least a
willingness to take a risky course of action that could lead to
hurting others. It's true that in some people sexual activity leads
to the sort of sexuelle Hoerigkeit (sexual dependency) that Kurt
Weil immortalized in a song in the Three Penny Opera (from which we
also get "Mack the Knife", which Joanna quoted earlier today); but,
as Jim Newell pointed out in a most sensible message earlier today,
not ALL sexuality results in dependency, addiction and violation.
If with positive intentions one approaches sexual contact with
another person of positive intentions and does so in a way that is
neither addictive nor attached to personal rewards, that can be
kaama (or raaga) that is completely free of all kles'as or
aas'ravas.

I wish I could remember the name of the svaamin who said that for a
monk brahmacaariya means celibacy, but for a householder
brahmacaariya means loving one's partner selflessly and practising
sexuality with him or her in a non-deluded and unselfish way. And
waht is important, he added, is brahmacaarya itself, not the
specific manner in which one practices it.  Admittedly, this svaamin
did not agree with S'aaripuutra. But I think he got the concept of
brahmacaariya just about exactly right, as when the Buddha said to
Aananda "Do not think that good friendship (kalyaa.na-mitrataa) is
half of brahmacaarya, Aananda, for in fact good friendship is the
all of brahmacaarya."

If you cannot imagine good friends being lovers, then it is probably
just as well to remain celibate. But even if that is your personal
choice, it is well to leave open the possibility that there may be
realities beyond the current limits of your imagination.

> His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said (personal communication) that
> Buddhism goes along with whatever science has discovered. This is
> a very open, nondogmatic position that seems to be very healthy.

With this I agree fully. I was quite thrilled to hear him say in a
small meeting about ten years ago that he feels that most of the
cosmological material in the Abhidharmakosha and other texts
represent a seriously outmoded way of looking at the world and at
such things as biology and psychology. In those areas, it would be
excellent for Buddhists to learn more about how human bodies and
brains work, so we can stop trying to figure out what the hell
humours are and what the four elements are supposed to be all about.

> It would be interesting then to see what parallels there might be
> between Buddhism and the scientific theory of the Big Bang.

I can't agree with you here. That question has absolutely no
practical utility. It is, in fact, one of the fourteen questions
that the Buddha recommended against wasting time thinking about. (If
he had know something about quantum mechanics, there would be
fifteen questions that a wise Buddhist would never try to answer.)
Besides, as Malcolm will readily tell you, Buddhas are completely
opposed to banging.

> The most obvious parallel that comes to mind is that the length of
> kalpas as described in Buddhism might be approximately similar to
> the length of periods between Big Bangs.

Aside from the fact that these periods are really big, and that we
are presumably pretty far from either the beginning or the end of a
big bang or a kalpa, what similarities are there? But before
answering that, please explain why this issue matters at all either
to a scientist, to a Buddhist or to a non-Buddhist who might be
toying with taking up practices aimed at cultivating greater
kindness and equanimity. Do you think someone at MIT is going to say
"Hey, the Buddhists were almost right about the length of time
between big bangs, so I think I'll take up mettaa-bhaavanaa practice
now!"?

> In my own scientific proof of several Buddhist teachings

There is no such thing as a scientific proof of anything. The only
thing scientific inquiry can do is to test hypotheses. And these
hypotheses must be in a form that allows testing in certain
controlled circumstances. Very few dogmas within Buddhism are in the
form that allow them to be tested scientifically. They can, however,
be tested subjectively. So I think it is far better to invite people
to try out Buddhist techniques for improving the quality of one's
mentality than to give them rash promises that cannot possibly ever
be fulfilled. To promise people that Buddhist teachings can ever be
scientifically proven is one such false promise from which it would
be wise to desist.

> but there is the possibility that with further thought, some
> alternative interpretation might turn up.

Jim, I say this without any malice whatsoever, but I do invite you
to consider the possibility that what you in particular need is to
think much less rather than giving these side issues even further
thought.

Have you ever read or listened to talks by Brian Swimm? Now there's
a guy who can get really wound up on all this talk of superstrings,
consciousness pre-existing the Big Bang, consciousness existing in
dimensions in which matter doesn't exist, the colour of butterfly
wings in Guatemala being determined by how people think and then
causing ice storms in Montreal a decade later, and all manner of
other speculative issues that have no bearing whatsoever on how we
live our lives in the practical world. I am not suggesting that
Brian Swimm uses cocaine, but the way he talks reminds me of the
boundless energy and limitless self-aggrandizement that sometimes
goes with the use of that drug. I have listened to several of his
tapes while driving across the Mojave desert (the only suitable
place to listen to someone whose thought processes are as arid as
his). His talks interest me for about five minutes, then I start
giggling at how hyperactive and enthusiastic and, well, Californian
his delivery is, and then I get hopelessly bored and start fumbling
around for my Van Morrison tapes. But I bet you'd really like him.

> This thread has the tone, in my opinion, that not just sex but any
> pleasurable experience is a "defilement". Being completely
> ignorant of what Vasubandhu wrote on the subject, I leave it to
> the buddhist scholars in the group to tell me if such is the case
> or not.

You have put your finger exactly on the central issue here. As I
understand what I have read of Indian Buddhist scholastic
literature, pleasure in itself is never regarded as a defilement.
(Actually, I don't even like the translation "defilement", because
it is already contaminated with numerous neurotic proclivities that
do not really belong to Indian Buddhist culture. I prefer to
translate aasrava as something like "intoxicant", and klesha as
something like "affliction".) As I understand it, a pleasure is an
intoxicant only when it clouds the understanding and supports or
reinforces what we might call a pyschological dependency (or, if I
may use the word in a non-technical sense, an addiction).

To me the key issue is whether any given experience is reinforcing
an addiction in a specified individual. Because addiction is a
highly individual matter, one cannot possibly give a blanket answer
to a question of the form "Is X addictive?" (or even "Is X an
intoxicant".) Rather one can at best answer questions of the form
"Is X addictive to person Y under circumstance Z."

> However, if indeed it is the case that buddhism (or the particular
> variety expressed by M. Smith) shows an "anti-sensual" component,
> it is highly reminiscent of the medieval catholic practices of
> renunciation of the pleasures of this world.

I think in ancient and medieval Buddhism there may have been a few
highly neurotic authors whose sense of renunciation of anything that
smacked of pleasure was every bit as robust as those medieval
Catholics who wore hair shirts and whipped their backs with ocatillo
branches. In the Surangama Sutra, for example, we find it said that
sexual pleasure in any form at all is an absolute barrier to gaining
enlightenment. (That same text tells us that eating meat, garlic,
leaks or onions or drinking alcohol under any circumstances is a
barrier to enlightenment.)

> Obviously being overly preoccupied (is this desire?) with any
> action, be it having sex, eating chocolate cake or whatever, to
> the point that we do stupid and horrible things to satisfy such a
> preoccupation (desire?) is probably not good.

This is exactly the way I see it. Being preoccupied with avoiding
anything is in no way less of a snare than being preoccupied with
indulging in it. It reminds me of the old adage that the prisoner
and the prison guard are both equally in prison.

Today I taught my last class of the semester. I told the class we
had been reading texts on Buddhist philosophy all semester, and
today we were going to go study it properly. I led them all outdoors
and we sat on a little hill under a huge cottonwood tree, and we
meditated together for an hour. It was a lovely way to bring a close
to a good class. Afterward, one of the young women in the course
caught up with me and said "My step-mother is a Buddhist. She
practices meditation every day and does all kinds of spiritual
practices, and I really love her, but she is the most self-absorbed,
self-centered, self-righteous person I have ever met. I don't get
it. Why is it that a Buddhist can be so full of herself and so
attached?" So I said I had noticed that most of the people I
see sitting around in doctor's offices look to be in very poor
health. I reckon the reason is that when people realize they are
really sick they go to see a doctor. And when people realize they
are hopelessly self-absorbed and ego-glutted, they go see a Buddhist
meditation teacher.

> However, is it possible to enjoy sense experience, be it sex,
> chocolate cake or holding a child's hand, without being defiled?

It depends a lot on what the child had in her hand just before you
held it.

> May we not regard the enjoyable sense experience as impermanent
> but enjoyable and move on?

A few weeks ago I was reading some essays by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. He
kept saying that a meditator has to learn just to enjoy the fleeting
pleasures of deep meditation while they last, enjoy them fully and
let them go without attachment and without regrets that they are
over. But when he comes to talking about sex, you'd think he was
talking about the most dangerous force on earth. It was not at all
obvious why he could not say about sex that a meditator has to learn
just to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of deep love-making while they
last, enjoy them fully and let them go without attachment and
without regrets that they are over.

> Likewise, may we not withstand the unenjoyable sense experience as
> impermanent and unpleasant and move on? I belief the latter is
> probably more difficult to do.

Just to test out your hypothesis, I went out and ate a bowl of ice
cream and then nailed my foot to the floor. I definitely found it
much more difficult to move on from the latter experience.

> Therefore, I will attempt to continue enjoying things in life with
> the realization that I wont always be able to do so and hopefully
> when the time comes when I wont be able to have sex, or eat
> chocolate cake or hold my daughter's hand, I will let go
> gracefully and continue.

That's the ticket. The wonderful thing about the human mind and
body, I find, is that they instinctively let go when it is time to
let go. When it's time to stop eating chocolate cake, one simply
loses the appetite for it. When it's time to stop making love, one
simply stops without regrets. When it's time to die, one just makes
a graceful exit. This is how it is with people who really learn to
listen to their bodies and minds. People who watch TV, on the other
hand, just let themselves get whipped up into a froth of mindless
acquisitiveness and panic about terrorists. When their hair turns
grey or white, they dye it. When their body tells them it's time to
stop procreational activities, they wolf down Viagra. When their
body says it's time to die now, they go bankrupt trying to stay
alive an extra couple of weeks. It's pathetic, really.

> On that note, I must go back to the rather unenjoyable, unpleasant
> and undesirable task I was trying to finish, before I was
> pleasantly distracted by the post.

Thanks for being distracted and sharing your distraction with us. It
was a lovely and insightful post, which I thoroughly enjoyed. But
I'm not addicted to it.

I just reread my message of yesterday on the topic of Brian Swimm's
effusive evangelism for Big Bang as the most accessible religious
myth for our times. On rereading what I wrote yesterday, I feel my
message may have sounded flippantly dismissive. While it's true that
I do ultimately dismiss Brian Swimm's version of Good News for
Modern Man, my dismissal is not nearly as glib as it appeared in
yesterday's message. So let me try again to be more soberly dismissive.

Quite a few years ago I heard Thomas Berry talking about the work that he
and Brian Swimm had done together. Berry is a theologian, and Swimm is a
theoretical physicist. The two of them collaborated from some time on a work
that they felt told a story of the universe that would be appealing to the
mentality of anyone who knows something about modern findings and theories
in the fields of geology, astrophysics and quantum mechanics, and at the
same time would be a true myth in the sense of a story that serves as a
vehicle for enduring spiritual values.

It is the conviction of Berry and Swimm that there is no traditional
religion, bar none, that offers a story of the universe that is fully
satisfying to people educated in the modern and post-modern age. (Berry is a
theologian, but he is also well known as a scholar of comparative religions,
especially religions of India, so he knows quite a lot about both Hinduism
and Buddhism.) Their contention is that humanity is doomed to remaining
spiritually adrift unless someone comes up with a story of the universe that
satisfies the hearts and the educated minds of people living in our age.
Their story of the universe is intended to replace traditional mythology.
Their story really is meant to be Good News (evangel, gospel), and their
enthusiasm for their story is therefore a decidedly evangelistic enthusiasm.

I am inclined to agree with what Berry and Swimm say about traditional
religious mythology not having much appeal to modernity. There is not a
single traditional religion that I can think of whose stories inspire me
more than they disturb and depress me. So in principle I am quite ready to
here a better story. Where I remain skeptical (that's American for
sceptical) is in the particular story they have chosen to tell. Try as I
might, I just cannot find anything in big bang theory, superstring theory,
black holes, thirteen-dimensional multiverses, fractal mathematics,
Lobachevskian geometry and the mathematics of chaos that speaks to my
condition as an environmentalist and as a human being with a psyche that
refuses to stay where I can find it.

I personally see very little promise for any venture into modern physics and
mathematics that will in any way support much of what I value in Buddhism.
The main potential I see in science is for major distractions from the
important tasks that Buddhism addresses rather well. But that is only my own
personal take, which I do not in any way take to be normative for all of
humanity. Others will no doubt find the Berry-Swimm project very appealing.
As I said yesterday, I can imagine that our friend Jim Newell might find
much of interest there; his own work seems to be headed in similar
directions to theirs.

My principal response to the Berry-Swimm project is to observe that it seems
very improbable that the human world will ever be so uniform in nature that
one story of the universe will suit everyone's spiritual needs. We will
therefore have to have many stories of the universe, none of them in
competition with the others. Those of us who find little to inspire us in
big bangs and thirteen-dimensional chaos that refuses to become a cosmos (a
place of order) will have to keep our ears and minds open to other kinds of
story.

Anyway, I just wanted to explain a little more carefully why I both dismiss
the sort of venture that Berry, Swimm and possibly Newell are embarking on
and strongly encourage them to keep embarking on that venture, just in case
it works for others whose conditioning their story speaks to.

> It would be glib of me to say that those joining in sexual
> activity, or drinking alcohol, are simply not aware of dukkha. It
> would be also glib of them to say that I simply don't understand
> how sexuality can occur without creating dukkha. We should all be
> mindful in whatever we do.

This states very well what I was fumbling around in my own awkward
way to say. My own experience has been that the more mindful I am,
the more mindful I am, so that after quite a few years of working at
being aware of bodily events, emotional events and thoughts, there
is very little that sneaks up on me anymore. This is what numerous
people report to me of their practice as well.

I am happy to report that a time does come eventually that one can have a
strong particularized loving relationship with an individual in a way that
does not in any way encroach on, but in fact actually enhances, the
universal friendship that one cultivates through mettaa-bhaavanaa
practice. It may take some time before one's mentality is settled enough
to do this, but it is definitely worth the wait. (I have also found, like
you, that alcohol has so little to recommend itself to my body or mind
that I rarely feel much of an urge to try it, even though I love the taste
of a good American bourbon.)

It has been a very long time since I read Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, but
as I recall one of the major themes in that book was this very issue of
whether one's renunciation must be external in order to be effective
internally. The main character, Siddhartha, met the Buddha and thought he
was a pleasant enough fellow, but Hesse's Siddha ultimately said "no
thanks" to external renunciation and stayed in the world without in any
way being entangled by it, thereby acheiving a kind of internal
renunciation. When I was forced to read the novel for the first time at
the age of 18, I was utterly baffled by it. (In those days I was so
dedicated to partying and marching for just causes that I couldn't imagine
why on earth anyone would renounce the world or even wish not to be fully
entangled in it.) Now at the age of 57, I see Siddhartha as a novel of
considerably more insight than I first was able to recognize in it. (But
when I finally read Hesse's Steppenwolf a few years ago, with great
expectations for a book about a guy whose name is the German word for
coyote, I was disappointed to discover it was just another novel about a
sick puppy.)

>> The best way to teach yoga to a sensible person today
>> is, as you say, to chuck all that old-fashioned theory about chakras
>> and energy centres and sheaths of consciousness and to talk instead
>> about enzymes, high density lipoproteins and triglycerides.
>
> 'Scuse me, but they are only theories to you because you
> (apparently) have no personal experience of them.

Au contraire, mon cher ami, I have had quite a lot of experience of
the cakras---far more than I have had direct experiences of
triglycerides. It's just that I have don't always take my
experiences as confirmations of the very theoretical structures that
gave shape to the experiences in the first place.

Moreover, my original point was that I tend to agree with Jim
Newell's observation that people are turned off by too much exotica.
Many people will run out of the room screaming if you begin a yoga
session talking about cakras. But talk to them of triglyceride
levels, and you've got them in the palm of your hand.

There are other people, of course, who will run out of a run
screaming if you talk about science, mathematical models and
triglyceride levels. You can keep THEM in the room only if you keep
talking about the sinking of Atlantis, space ships crashing near
Roswell, astral travels with Elvis, and gurus whose hearts are so
pure that their bones turn to diamond. These people have a
psychological need to feel they know all kinds of things that their
neighbours have no idea about, so you can keep them in the palm of
your hand if you talk about all kinds of subtle drops, winds,
channels and cakras full of lotus petals with Tibetan letters
written all over them.

The point is that you can teach people only if they are willing to
stay in the room. And you can teach them absolutely everything of
value, bar nothing, by speaking to them in language they already
accept and understand. And you are not as likely to keep people in
the room if you can do no more than belittle them by saying things
like "Talking to you about subtle bodies is as pointless as talking
to a blind man about colours." Ever hear the Buddha or any other
meditation coach talk like that to a client?

> One's subtle body can be observed by others who have developed
> this ability as well as by one's self. What more proof could you
> want?

You weren't paying attention, Dante. I am not seeking any proof at
all of anything. What I am saying is that if you can set up an
experiment that will TEST your hypothesis of subtle bodies, then it
would be acceptable as a scientific hypothesis, one among many. If
all you can do is say you have experienced something and so have
other people who believe exactly as you do, then you are not yet
ready for science.  You are ready only for dogmatism. You're ready
only to join the ranks of all those fellows in the Vatican who were
prepared to burn astronomers at the stake for daring to suggest that
the earth rotates around the sun, despite the fact that everybody
alive could experience the stillness of the earth and the motion of
the sun and that scriptures could be twisted in various ways to
support the geocentric dogma.

>> Why? What would be gained by that kind of discussion? Let's put it
>> more personally to you: what would YOU gain from a discussion of
>> people's experiences while meditating?
>
> I would gain the benfit of other's experience and possible advice, and
> anyone who might be interested might benefit from mine.

That sort of discussion is best carried on out of public view. You
have issued your invitation. If people wish to discuss these issues
with you by writing you personally, I'm sure they will contact you.

> Or, falling asleep while concentrating on the brow chakra causes
> me to sleep especially deeply, and it seems to make it more
> difficult to wake up in the morning. Have others experienced this,
> and if so, what do they make of it?

Yes, I have experienced this. I have also discovered that I have
deeper meditations when I focus my concentration at the beginning on
the brow cakra. What do I make of it? Well, I make of it that when I
want to sleep deeply, it's not a bad idea to concentrate on a spot
just behind my eyebrows. What more is there to make of it than that?

But, frankly, having deep sleep and deep meditative experiences is
not what Buddhism is about, just as it's not about lowering
triglyceride levels and raising HDL levels. It's about cultivating
an uninterrupted flow of mental states that do not harm others but
in fact help others. (Note that this is completely unscientific,
because it requires the applications of evaluative standards of what
is harmful and helpful, and issues of value are outside the realm of
science altogether. That's why Jim Peavler says let's let science be
science and let religion be religion.)

Now it turns out that there are lots of ways of cultivating a steady
flow of positive mental states besides concentrating on cakras.
Because one can improve one's mentality without working with cakras,
and because one can work on cakras for a lifetime and still be a
self-absorbed, purblind, fatuous jerk, I have concluded that cakra
work is really a sideshow. It is neither necessary nor sufficient to
gain the benefits of Buddhist practice.

> One could say that in describing the jhanas in objective language,
> the Buddha was trying to make "personal meditative experiences"
> sound objective and scientific.

The Buddha was probably almost as ignorant of science as you are,
perhaps even more so. Science as we know it didn't exist in his
time. So he was decidedly not trying to make anything scientific and
objective. He was simply giving other meditators some very
artificial and archetechtonic guidelines by which they could make
approximate subjective assessments of how they were doing in the
main task at hand, which was to cultivate the thirty-seven factors
of awakening, one of which was not to become so attached to any
particular theory as to become abusive of those who do not share it
with you.

Now I don't usually give people a lot of advice about meditation,
but there is a practice I can recommend for you, Dante. For about a
month I would recommend that instead of meditating on the cakra
behind your eyebrows, you meditate on that big chip on your
shoulder.

> I'm curious. What is a subtle body? Or, rather What is it a name
> for?

If you are asking for the Sanskrit term for it, it is suuk.sma-s'ariira
(pronounced approximately suukshma shariira). The word suuk.sma means,
according to Apte's Sanskrit dictionary, "subtle, minute, atomic; trivial,
small, unimportant; fine, thin, delicate, subtle; refined; crafty, artful,
deceitful; ingenuous." (How can the same word mean both deceitful and
ingenuous, you ask, and both trivial and refined? Well, there is a joke
among Sanskritists that every word in that language names some thing, the
opposite of that thing, and a position in sexual intercourse.)

In the Upanishads there are numerous discussions of various degrees of
experience, or difference aspects of oneself that can be experienced. One of
the most famous is the discussion of the five sheaths or scabbards (koshas)
in the Taittiriiya Upanishad. The most obvious and easily detected aspect of
self is the physical body, called the body of food. This corresponds to the
recognition that everyone is placed somewhere along the food chain. This
gives rise to the expression "Oh how wonderful it is! I am food, I am food,
I am food! I am also the eater of food." So that is the coarse or thick body
(sthuula-s'ariira). Then there are four other scabbards discussed, each said
to be more subtle (suukk.sma) than the one before it: breath, sensory input
and emotional reaction (called manomayakosha), understanding (or insight or
intuition) and bliss.

In early Indian psychological theory, which one can find in the yoga system
and in various other scholastic systems, there are various ways of
explaining such phenomena as dreaming and what we would probably call
imagination or fantasy or even hallucination. One way of talking about these
phenomena was to say that inside the thick physical body is a subtle body
(one that cannot be detected by the five external senses) that can leave the
thick physical body behind and go to other realms. So when one dreams,
according to this primitive theory, the subtle body actually goes somewhere
and sees things that the senses of the waking physical body are too coarse
and unrefined to see. Or when a yogi has a vision, or a imagines walking on
the surface of the moon, this is explained as the subtle body leaving the
coarse body and actually going to the locus of the content of the vision
(such as a hell realm or a celestial realm or perhaps what a southern
Californian might call a different tempero-spatial dimension) or actually
going to the surface of the moon. When Buddhist meditation manuals talked
about some experiences, they said that the yogi experiences certain things
with a body made of thought; I suspect we would simply call it imagination
or the firing of neurons that produce an internal experience.

Within Buddhist scholasticism, there was quite a bit of controversy about
whether there is a subtle body. Some thought it was just a way of speaking,
while others seemed to believe there really is a subtle body. Aside from
giving an account of dreams, the subtle body was thought by some to be a
physical vehicle (in the sense that it was supposedly made of the four
elements, but arranged in a form too subtle for the physical senses to
perceive) for the aspects of the mentality that are carried from one
physical body to another. It is the subtle body, for example, that has the
experiences in the antaraabhava (known better in the West by the Tibetan
word bar-do).

The whole idea of the subtle body entering into a bardo was rejected by
Theravaada and some other schools of Indian Buddhism, but it was accepted by
Vasubandhu for a while, and of course later became a staple of Tibetan
Buddhism. It represents an interesting synthesis of classical Buddhist and
classical Vedaantin (Upanishadic) and epic (the principal source of the
classical Saamkhya and Yoga systems) thinking. It represents a stage in the
evolution of Buddhist thought. Some prefer to remain arrested at that stage
of evolution, while others would probably rather move on to a further stage
that would be a marriage of classical and medieval Buddhist theory with
modern neurophysiological and psychoanalytic theory.

Incidentally, when I underwent four years of Jungian psychoanalysis (while
entertaining a fantasy of training to become a psychotherapist), the analyst
I worked with was very much steeped in various mythologies, including Indian
(mostly Hindu) mythology, so much of the work we did together involved
exploring cakras. I found it interesting. (I also found it rather ironic
that I had done something like twenty-five years of meditation under the
direction of Theravaadin teachers and a Zen master and had never once heard
a reference to cakras; I learned about them from a Jungian analyst in
Montreal.)

I have probably told you much more than you wanted to know, and now all my
Indological colleagues will rush in to tell you that I have completely
garbled the history of Indian thought. (The fact of the matter is that I
rarely get the big picture wrong, but I rarely get the details right, as
witness my recent garbling of the story of Galileo and the novel Siddhartha.
That's because I stay away from the devil, who lives, as is well known, in
the details.)

> So first you say that people are turned off by too much exotica, then you
> give your own list of exotica that turn alot of people on. Which is it?

Apparently all your profound meditative experiences and experiments
with psychedelics have not yet taught you the subtle art of reading.
If you will go back and read what I wrote, I said that SOME people
like hearing about body chemistry and would explain everything in
those terms, while OTHER people prefer to hear about cakras and so
forth. A skilled mediation coach or yoga trainer should be able to
speak to people in whichever set of metaphors they feel most
comfortable with.

> Maybe not, but thats also not what I said. I said that calling
> chakras "old fashioned theories" was on par with a blind man
> calling colors "old fashioned theories". Since you now claim to
> have experience of them, why would they be only "old fashioned
> theories" to you?

The experiences are absolutely universal. There is not a human beng
on earth has has not experienced certain physical sensations located
in various parts of the body. There are many ways of talking about
those experiences. Speaking of them in terms of cakras is rather
quaint and poetic, but it works well enough for people who like
quaint and poetic expressions. Other people would talk about those
same experiences in different terms. Scientists are not blind to
colour. They are simply inclined to talk about colour in technical
language rather than poetically. Similarly, they are not blind to
the cakras. Rather, they are inclined to talk about the experiences
of those experiences in a less poetic way than ancient Indians did.

Science therefore has absolutely nothing to learn from Buddhism.
But Buddhists, if they wish to reach people who are familiar with
science, have nothing to lose if they translate old ways of talking
about universal experiences into the language of modern physiology
and psychology.

>> c: Buddhism is scientific in a natural way, though it is not
>> science as is currently considered to be Western. When Buddhists
>> try meditating in various ways, and then seeing the results, this
>> is experiement to try to discover knowledge. When Buddhists look
>> at their minds to see what seems impermanent, etc. so as to gain
>> knowledge of mind, that is scientific observation.
>
> I agree, this is what I was trying to say in my response to Prof. Hayes. The
> western definition of "science" is limited and should either be expanded, or
> a different word should be used to describe what you are talking about.

Given those choices, I would go with the latter. Science is best
left as a word describing studies that are done using scientific
method, which consists in formulating defeasible hypotheses that can
be tested in controlled experiments. Science is best seen as a
substractive filter that reduces the amount of things we previously
thought we knew.

The word to use for theories such as the cakras is metaphysics.
Another word is poetry. Yet anohter is mythology. None of these
terms is pejorative; all are purely descriptive of a kind of
thinking or expression dealing with values and feelings and how we
subjectively perceive things.

> I have never experienced anything I could call "eye consciousness"

You are blind then? I'm sorry to hear that. Eye-consciousness is
just a fancy word for vision.

> in the way the subtle body is perceived, that is, as a substance,
> or energy, that is felt to flow and pulsate.

That could be a sugar high you are talking about here. I would
recommend cutting down on caffeine, sugar and LSD.

> In the West, religion was a government tool for uniting the
> population and preventing crime

You need to get out more, Jim. Using religion to control people has
a ver long history in every civilization on earth, so what you say
is not true only of the West.

> In Asia, on the other hand, religion was less political, and there
> was more leaway in what people could believe.

Wow, you really DO need to study more history of such places as
China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Mongolia and Tibet.

> (in Christianity, one is saved if one believes the right thing).

While you're at it, I think you had better take a few courses in
Christianity.

> Some people are defensive about the word mystic, but if it is
> defined to mean people who do meditation practices, observe their
> own minds, and try to reach a better mode of consciousness

And then you could take some courses in mysticism. The word "mystic"
literally means an initiate into a mystery. The term comes from the
Greek mystery religions in which there were supposed to be realms of
knowledge to which one had no access without being initiated and
empowered in special ceremonies. The only mysticism within Buddhism is
tantrism. Religions that are based on meditative practices and so
forth are best called "contemplative", not "mystical".

> The point you're missing may perhaps be more subtle than I
> thought. In India, kings didn't punish, sometimes execute, people
> who refused to sacrifice to the official state God. That, however,
> was commonplace in Rome, Greece and the Middle East.

There have also been periods in the history of Tibet in which people
who read or taught other than Buddhists texts had their eyes put
out, their tongues amputated or their hands surgically removed.
There have also been times in China when Buddhist emperors
perseculated Nestorian Christians. It was fairly common in India at
different times for a king of one persuasion to persecute people of
other persuasions. In Kamakura Japan, Nichiren made representation
to the government to put follows of Pure Land Buddhism to death. The
government decided instead to sentence Nichiren to death. (The
sentence was never carried out, but that does not alter the fact
that it was ordered.) Earlier in Japanese history there were periods
when the Shinto-based government persecuted Buddhists, and other
times when Buddhist-based governments relatiated. In short, the
track record in Asia is not at all different from the track record
in Europe or the Middle East.

> even in China, multiple religions were allowed most of the time.

Yes, and even in the Middle East and Europe multiple religions were
allowed most of the time. The times of persecution were relatively
rare, about as rare as they were anywhere else.

> In India, not only did rajas allow multiple religions, but they loved to have
> debates about religion.

Some did. Some did not. The same as in Europe.

> When Islam coinquered India, some of this tolerance faded rather
> badly,

Akbar the Great, a Muslim, was probably the most open-minded king in
the history of India. His grandson, however, was probably one of the
most intolerant. One cannot generalise.

> but Islam ia a Western religion, not an Asian one, so that is
> understandable.

Jim, prejudice is an ugly and insidious force. And I hate to have to
be the one to tell you this, but your negative assessment of Islam
and Christianity is nothing but prejudice and negative stereotyping.
You have fallen prey to the worst disease that afflicts Western
Buddhists, namely a kind of Occidentalism, that is, a christophobic
disdain for anything occidental and an exaggerated love of
everything eastern. Take a dose of reality to help cure you of this
hideous affliction.

> Tibet had multiple religious denominations almost
> from the beginning. There were some conflicts involving politics, but that
> didn't cause one denomination to burn the members of other denominations at
> the stake until the other denominations were destroyed.

True, the Tibetans did not burn their foes at the stake. Instead,
they burned threw their religious rivals from tall buildings onto
sharpened stakes and burned their libraries and razed their
monasteries.

> All defiled conditioned dharmas are source of suffering. We have already
> agreed that this is so.

This is the last time I am going to say this, Malcolm. THERE IS NO
SUCH CONCEPT AS DEFILEMENT IN BUDDHISM. That is a completely inept
and incompetent and wrong-headed translation of a term that means
something quite different. The Sanskrit term is aasrava (sometimes
spelled aas'rava), which is explained in Buddhist texts as being a
sore, an affliction, the pus that runs out of a suppurating wound or
as the flowing of water. None of these metaphors has anything to do
with defilement, a word that means to make filthy or to pollute.
Here ends the lesson on the correct way to translate that important
key word.

Now I have never agreed that defiled dharmas are a source of
suffering, because I don't believe there are any defiled dharmas.
What I have agreed to is that any conditioned dharma that is
attended by clinging MAY result in suffering. Now if one has a
sexual relationship, or even a non-sexual loving relationship, with
another person but does not cling to that relationship or become
psychologically dependent on it, then there is not even the dukkha
of change. The dukkha of change comes about only when one is not
prepared to let go.

One can love, even sexually, and be prepared to let go. In such a
case, one's pain on separation need be no more intense than that of
the Buddha, who after the deaths of Saariputta and Mogallana,
remarked "The assembly seems very empty without these two friends."
You see, one can notice the absence of a loved one, even feel some
grief about it as the Buddha obviously did, but still be unattached.
The goal of Buddhism is not to have no feeling at all, no sadness at
all about anything that naturally provokes sadness, but rather not
to be so overwhelmed with negativity that one cannot eventually
regain balance.

> I think you are a romantic, Richard, this is not a bad thing; indeed,
> it's cute.

"Romantic" and "cute" are just further examples of those meaningless
labels that people insist on putting on each other.

> Me, I'm just a bitter [almost] ex-husband.

I'm an ex-husband many times over, but I've never been bitter. I
guess maybe that does make me a romantic. But cute? Forget it.

> "Loving" and "caring" being conducted by normal person is still
> defiled conditioned

Not in my experience. But personal experience has never counted for
much in the face of the dogmatic certainty that authoritative texts
provide a dedicated scholastic.

> I guess I simply do not accept that this is possible for ordinary human
> persons who are still under the influence of active and latent
> defilements.

You might begin to understand if you could stop thinking of
conditioned dharmas as dirty. As long as you persist in thinking
about mental states and actions as filthy, dirty and impure, you'll
never be able to see the value in anything positive. Say, have you
ever considered becoming a Catholic? I think your dread of filthy
thoughts might serve you well in that religion.

> I put more faith in formal definitions defined by persons I
> consider to have cultivated superlative states of wisdom, rather
> then the experiences of common sentient beings, especially when
> such wisdom corresponds with my own experience.

Here's the problem, Malcolm. If you yourself are a common sentient
being, then your estimation of who has superlative states of wisdom
is contaminated (perhaps even defiled) by your own lack of wisdom,
perhaps even by your attachment (upaadaana) to certain views. This
means that you are prone to considering wise anyone who agrees with
your prejudices. And that means you are likely to get locked into a
vicious cycle of simply reinforcing all the prejudices that are
instrumental in keeping you bitter and unhappy. What I would
recommend doing instead is finding a good lover. He or she will help
keep you balanced, provided you don't become too clinging.

> I do not know anyone who experiences such sublime detachment and
> maintains interest in sex.

Perhaps you do know such people but are not willing to admit the
possibility that they do so.

> I guess I fundamentally don't believe such states exist for ordinary
> people, even if they are committed practitioners.

You do not believe in stream entry?

> However, in the case of householders, I do not accept that their
> relationship will not be fundamentally predicated on the defilement of
> desire.

So you reject outright the possibility of anyone following the model
of Vimalakiirti?

> Should someone prefer the company of another because of their
> appearance or the sound of their voice, etc., as opposed to
> someone else, this also is a subtle form of desire coming into
> play

One of the things the Buddha repeatedly said to be one of the most
important ingredients in the religious life (brahmacaarya) was
keeping the company of good people (sat-purusha-sangraha). If one's
choosing the company of another person is not because of her
appearance or the sound of his voice, but an admiration for that
person's good character and a recognition that keeping company with
such a person will keep one solidly on the path, then that subtle
desire is for just exactly the sort of thing that the Buddha said
one should have a desire for. The Buddha did not say only that one
should have aversion for offensive things; he also said that it is
not a bad idea to have an attraction for truly lovely things, such
as virtue and integrity and kindness.

> I can imagine good friends being lovers, I simple can't imagine
> them being lovers without such a motivation being defiled.

Perhaps you need to upgrade your imagination, mon ami.

Richard (to Malcolm): You might begin to understand if you could
stop thinking of conditioned dharmas as dirty.

Malcolm: I don't equate defilement with dirty; I equate it with "conducive
to suffering".

Mike: Richard & Malcolm, I would be interested what both of you have to say
about the second of the four seals, which I have as follows: all defiled
things are suffering (duhkhah sarvasasravah)

Richard; First, my objection to the word "defilement" is that the English
word means "dirty, polluted". So if one thinks of aasrava as conducive to
suffering, it is better not to translate it as "defilement", unless one's
intention is to mislead and confuse speakers of English.

The term aasrava, as I understand it, was first used by the Jains.
In their system it referred to the liquid that leaks out of a
unhealed canker sore. For that reason, some PTS translators rendered
the word as "canker". That translation gets the point of soreness
(du.hkha) across rather well. The Jain metaphor, as I recall it,
had more to do with stickiness. The aasravas were those mental
factors that made karma cling to the soul, thereby weighing it down
so that it remained in the world of suffering rather than letting it
rise out of the world into a liberated state. Austerities were
practised to dry up the oozing sores, thereby reducing the
stickiness. When the soul was dry, according to Jains, karma no
longer stuck to it. The Buddha adopted the term itself but did not
follow quite the same metaphorical interpretation.

To review very basic doctrine, the four aasravas (cankers, if you
like) are: desire for pleasure (kaama), desire for continued
existence (bhava), views (d.r.s.ti) and ignorance or misconception
(avidyaa).

The test of a mental attitude and the action that flows from it is
an aasrava is whether or not it actually produces du.hkha. It is
well known that arhants experience all kinds of pleasure. So
pleasure is not at all the issue; rather, it is the craving for
pleasure, the addiction to it, the inability to feel contentment
without it that is the problem.

The issue we have been discussing here is whether sexual activity is
necessarily an aasrava (a canker). My take on this issue is that
sexual activity MAY be an aasrava, and it may not be. Whether it is
depends entirely on how one undertakes sexual activity. If one is
addicted to it, cannot be happy without it, depends on it for a
sense of well-being, then it is most assuredly a canker that is
actively producing pain. If one is not addicted to it, can be quite
contented without it, does not crave it, does not have a
psychological dependency on it and so forth, then it is not a
canker.

One cannot make hard and fast rules about what is a canker. It
depends entirely on one's individual mentality and level of
maturity. For some people, I would go on to observe, an attachment
to celibacy is probably every bit as much of a canker as sexual
activity would be; celibacy is the source of considerable anguish
and discomfort for them. (See how skewed this issue becomes if one
translates aasrava as "defilement"? One can easily see that celibacy
could be a sore point, but it is harder to see it as something
filthy and polluted, which is what the English word "defiled"
normally means.)

Mike: I don't think anyone here would claim their mind is so pure
that their actions don't have a component that could result in
dukkha.

Richard: Again I would have to say that the issue here is not one of
purity. The issue is one of pain, and especially avoidable
psychological pain. Remember that arhants still feel physical pain,
and they still feel such psychological pains as are the natural
ripening of previous karma. (Angulimala, for example, still felt the
pain of being attacked by angry villagers after he became an arhant,
and he still felt the pain of remorse on recalling his previous acts
of violence.)

Mike: Therefore, is it feasible to have a general categorisation of
actions that ranks them in order of how conducive they are to
suffering?

Richard: That sounds like a good enough idea in principle. The only
way I know of to measure how conducive an attitude or verbal or
physical action is to pain is to see whether it actually does lead
to pain. Only an individual can know whether she is actually feeling
pain, or if she is causing others to feel pain. If she is not
feeling or causing pain, then there is really no problem. If her
pain is only very slight, or if it is a pain that she willingly
endures, then there is also either very little problem or no problem
at all.

There are people who have sexual relations in a very uncomplicated
way that causes no pain to themselves or to anyone else. (If this
has not been your personal experience, then I have to ask you to
trust me on this one.) For those people, sexuality is not a canker.
It is anaasrava. Quod erat demonstrandum.

There. I have won the debate. Give me my money. I have to go write
some articles, which I thoroughly intend to enjoy doing without
becoming in any way attached to the pleasures thereof. (See, even
academic writing, like sex, CAN be anaasrava.)

> I do remember having conversations with Buddhist Scholars (which ones in
> particular has slipped my mind) who claimed that this deferring by
> female monastics was because the women who joined the sangha were for
> the most part quite wealthy and attached to their status and creature
> comforts.

That's a new one to me. The explanation I have always been drawn to (and
one that at least one other person on this list, Dan Lusthaus, has
expressed it right in public) is that the first people who sought to be
bhikkhunis were Gotama's aunt (who was also his step-mother) and her
friends. The potential for a group of old crones to tell the budding
Buddha, who would always be a mere child in their eyes, how to run the
show was enormous. The only way he could preserve his dignity was to
formally limit the influence of the old ladies. This explanation makes a
great deal of sense to anyone who has ever had a mother.

Lusthaus said it much more concisely: "How many of you guys want your
mother hanging around the Zen centre?"

> A curious aside: Stanford's site also contains announcements from
> 2 years ago that Schopen was coming there to teach, that he'd
> finally found a home, etc. We see he was there for a while, as
> always without an email address, etc. Then he up and disappeared
> back to UCLA - apparently never really leaving or the like. What
> gives? The guy is brilliant, doesn't answer email, writes
> decidedly 'studied odd' intros to his compilations of journal
> articles published as books. Does he have a point?

Schopen and I studied Tibetan together way back when we were both graduate
students. Schopen was then described by his best friend as someone who
would set out to prove that something was black if everyone else believed
it was white, and then, as soon as he had convinced everyone that the
thing was black, would turn around and prove it was white after all. Part
of what motivates him, I think, is this contrary nature which enables him
to derive supreme pleasure by proving everyone else wrong. This tendency
was cultivated to a high degree during his apprenticeship with De Jong,
who taught him the importance of having contempt for all non-European
scholars, and for all practitioners and non-philologists and
non-historians.

But there is more to Schopen than that. He also has a robust suspicion of
all scholasticism. He told me many times that his mother was a pious
Catholic who had never read or even heard of Saint Augustine or Saint
Thomas Aquinas, and he was convinced that most pious Buddhists know next
to nothing about Naagaarjuna, Vasubandhu, Buddhaghosa or Tsong kha pa. He
wanted, therefore, to study just about all the aspects of Buddhism that
lie outside scholasticism and philosophy, which he thinks are
over-represented in Buddhist Studies.

As a Catholic, Schopen also feels that most Buddhist scholarship in the
West is overwhelmed with a Protestant bias. (Perhaps he has not taken
sufficient note of the substantial percentage of scholars of Buddhism who
are neither Catholic nor Protestant but Jewish.) Schopen once told me that
he felt that La Vallee Poussin and Lamotte had a profound understanding of
Buddhism because they were Catholics, whereas Protestant scholars had an
almost constitutional inability to comprehend Buddhist practices and
doctrines.

Brilliant?  I am not sure he is brilliant; I think you may find him that
way, Ken, because he is bigoted in approximately the same ways you are.
(People who share our cranky prejudices always seem stunningly bright and
original.) Rather than brilliant I would say that Schopen is almost
neurotically thorough and succumbs repeatedly to his anal-retentive urge
to cite every book he has ever read (and he has probably read more than
anyone I personally know) in almost every footnote he writes. That
tendency gives his work an air of authority, but it also adds quite a lot
of clutter that may obscure the flow of his argumentation. (Perhaps I am
just too dumb, but I frequently find myself wondering just what you asked,
Ken: "Does he have a point?")

The last time I saw Schopen, a few years ago, we was still not using
a computer. He was still writing everything out in pencil and giving
it to secretaries to type. He takes notes on index cards and puts
them in a shoe box, which he feels is more efficient in the long
run than using a computer. That could explain why he does not answer
e-mail. If you write him a letter in pencil on yellow legal-size
paper (be sure to use both sides and fill the margins, because he
hates wastefulness), he may answer you. Then again, he may not.

> Bit of a naughty aside -- but I wonder if this has anything to do
> with Paul Williams going RC (shock, horror) after many years of
> devout Gelug Buddhism?

Paul wrote quite a nice article about his conversion to Catholicism in a
British Catholic journal. I have also corresponded with him off and on
privately and am happy (but not at all surprised) to report that Paul is
every bit as intelligent and thoughtful and careful and insightful as a
Catholic as he was as a dGe-lugs-pa. The conversion don't seem to have
done him no harm. In fact, I reckon it has done him a great deal of good,
by putting him back in touch with the roots that once nourished him and
helped form his admirably good character. (I am sure this must come as bad
news to those poor Buddhist souls who take no end of pleasure in bashing
and blaming Christians. Indeed, it seems to turn one of the Four Reliances
upside down, suggesting that perhaps it is more important to rely on the
authentic character of teacher than to worry about the authenticity of the
teachings.)

What I suspect is that as the generation of baby-boomer Buddhist
converts moves into the refined and reflective dignity of old age,
we will witness the majority of them rediscovering their
pre-Buddhist roots and, among those who are capable of honesty and
self-understanding, even "converting" back to Christianity. (Jewish
Buddhists will have an easier go of it, since not many of them have
left Judaism in the first place, so they will probably not go back
to Judaism as much as quietly and gradually let Buddhism slip into a
comfortablly obscure corner in the deep background of the synagogue,
at a safe distance from the Torah scrolls.)

> Does anybody on this list know anything about it and/or if there
> were other incidents of Japanese soldiers staying behind in the
> parts of Asia the Japanese had invaded before 1945, specifically
> as Buddhist monks or lay followers.

Not at all what you seek, but a fascinating film nevertheless, is a
documentary entitled "The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On." It's in
Japanese with English subtitles and chronicles the tribulations of
an old man who was once in the Japanese army in Indonesia. His unit
was somehow stranded or forgotten and stayed on in the jungles for
some time after the war was over. Severely short of food, they were
ordered to eat the bodies of dead Indonesians, then eventually to
kill Indonesians for food.  (They were given strict orders, for some
obscure reason, only to eat dark meat, not white meat, that is,
Indonesians rather than Americans or Europeans.)

The main character in this documentary, as I said, was an old
Japanese man who had been a common soldier and is now trying to find
his former superior officers to extract from them a confession and
an apology for the traumas their men had undergone as a result of
forced cannibalism. He confronts one former office after another,
but every single one of them "can't remember" anything about the
war and waves him aside with benign recommendations not to dwell on
unpleasant things from the past. It is one of the most fascinating
and wrenching (and, in a paradoxical way, almost comical) glimpses
into the phenomenon of denial and selective amnesia I have ever
seen.

If ever one wants to see how people---any people, whether Japanese,
Germans, Americans, Iranians or Israelis---who have done and
witnessed and condoned unspeakably horrible things during war can
then "forget" all about them in times of relative peace, this film
is a must see.

> I don't know what to think. I readily confess/admit to being
> cranky & opinionated thanks to Conze, Campbell, most of all
> Eidmann kangaku; Schopen fits in the same picture. In similar
> fashion, are you not in line with Warder?

I would tend to hope not. I took only two courses with Warder during
the early stages of my graduate career, and he refused to speak to
me after I made the decision to do my doctoral thesis under Bimal
Matilal's supervision. (Choosing to work with anyone but Warder was
perceived by Warder as prima facie evidence of complete academic
incompetence, perhaps even insanity.) When I finally defended my
thesis, written under the joint supervision of Bimal Matilal and
Shoryu Katsura, Warder voted to fail it on the grounds that I had a
total misunderstanding of Buddhism. (His principal evidence was that
I described certain Buddhist philosophical enquiries as
"metaphysical" in nature, a word to which Professor Warder had an
abiding allergy that was, oxymoronically, both profound and
shallow.)

After I got a PhD, much to Warder's great disgust and in the midst of his
loud grumblings about how the standards in Buddhist studies had fallen to
intolerable depths of mediocrity, he ably set about the task of making my
first teaching assignment at University of Toronto as unpleasant as
possible, describing me before my colleagues and in my presence as an
anti-Buddhist fanatic. (After all, who but an anti-Buddhist fanatic would
describe a Buddhist philosopher writing on ontology as a metaphysician?
What's more, I had abandoned the only true form of Buddhism, Theravada,
for Korean Zen of all things; what clearer sign of apostatic born-again
anti-Buddhist fanaticism could one ask for?) Despite all that, for some
reason I continued to appreciate Warder's scholarship and his sense of
humour, although the latter was a bit too mordant for my taste.

Although I have failed miserably in the process, I have striven for
all my life to be, as much as my limitations will allow, like
Professors Katsura and Matilal. In both of these men I saw daily
examples of intellectual rigour combined with the greatest of human
kindness. Matilal often told his students that learning to think
clearly and critically placed one in a position of great
responsibility, for it put a person in a position to destroy the
faith that people may need to survive. Above all other principles,
Matilal taught (explicitly but even more through his example)
philosophical non-violence (ahi.msaa). Also from him I learned to
value dispassionate discussion (vaada) and to despise heated
partisan polemics and destructive quibbling.

> Having particpated in Buddha-L for nearly a decade, we've
> minimally managed a long term endurance

Who is "we"? If you mean the denizens of BUDDHA-L taken as a whole,
I think we have done much more than endure. Endurance implies a
gritting of teeth. Speaking only for myself, I feel I have learned a
great deal from the conversations that have taken place here during
the past decade. My perceptions on almost every topic in Buddhism
have undergone constant change as people have brought forth
considerations that I had overlooked. I have grut my teeth seldom
but have smiled, grinned and even giggled a thousand times over. The
people who share their thoughts on this forum have proven to be
valued companions, for whom I would say gratitude is a more apt
description than endurance.

> the dogged intolerance of years past seems to have become a rich
> acceptance of each other

Whose dogged intolerance of whom? I have seen remarkably little
intolerance of anyone by anyone else expressed on BUDDHA-L over the
years.

> along with the knowledge that at least some of us have deepened
> the communication while a larger group baled for thin reasons afew
> years ago.

Truth be told, the readership of BUDDHA-L has held steady. At the end of
the first year or so it had around 150 subscribers. After about five years
the readership was over 800, and it has continued to be at that level ever
since. It may be worth bearing in mind that the vast majority of BUDDHA-L
subscribers read far more than they write.

> I really like Richard, despite not liking him whatsoever at all at
> times past!!!!

I can only say it's every bit as much a mysterious to me why you like me
now as it is why you did not like me at all in the past.  Perhaps, like
all of us who know each other only as faceless words, you have been
struggling mostly with your own shadow. Know the Greek word for struggle?
It's "agonia". Know the Arabic word for struggle? It's "jihad". May your
agonizing jihad soon come to an irenic termination.

> Isn't this the spirit of buddhism?

To me the spirit of Buddhism is best captured in the advice that the
Buddha gave on using speech. If I may be permitted a slight paraphrase, he
said this:

begin{paraphrase}
 If you know that words are unfactual, untrue, unbeneficial,
 unendearing and disagreeable to others, do not say them. If you know
 that words are factual, true, and beneficial but disagreeable, then
 wait for the right time to say them. Even if you know that words are
 factual, true, beneficial and agreeable to others, wait for the
 right time to say them.
end{paraphrase}

> Coming from the secular Jewish subset this leaves me out in the
> street where I've always been, anyhow.

I think many of us who had completely secular upbringings find ourselves
on the same street, whether our secularity was Jewish or Yankee. (I guess,
in a way, I did have a Jewish upbringing, despite my New England ancestry,
in that nearly all my attitudes toward religion were shaped by the two
great Jewish thinkers Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, while my social graces
were forged by an abundance of exposure to Groucho Marx.)

It has been interesting to me to witness many of my Buddhist friends
rediscovering their childhood religions and experiencing a kind of
spiritual homecoming after a few decades of feeling like strangers in a
strange land. Although I have experienced a joyous geographical homecoming
to the high deserts New Mexico, where I spent my childhood, I have had no
craving to return to the arid spiritual wasteland of my parent's cramped
anti-religiosity. True, I cannot (because I do not wish to) shake my dread
of organized and institutionalized religions, but I hope I never return to
being as hostile to religion as I was as a young coyote pup who used to
stand on the rooftop shouting insults at gentle folk returning home from
church of a Sunday morning.

> Any sincere Buddhist guy should want his mother around the Zen
> center, although perhaps some might feel embarrassed because
> society would make fun of that as really uncool, etc.. Societal
> norms of that kind are hard to resist. But of course, one wants
> one's mother to become enlightened if possible.

I can honestly say I have no desire for anyone to be enlightened, for the
simple reason that I don't have the faintest idea what the word means. Are
you thinking of the period of time that Europeans called the
Englightenment?

As a Buddhist, I would be content to see everyone be content. And so
naturally I wished to see my mother content, and was therefore happy for
her when she died and left all her troubles behind.

I'm afraid I can't see any connection at all with my mother's contentment
and any Zen centre I was ever around. She would have seen through all of
us Zen phoneys in a split second. Because I knew that, and was still
deeply into be a phoney Zennie, I would never have wanted her around a Zen
centre while I was there. I imagine the Buddha felt the same way when he
was busy acting like a guru. His mother would have spotted his pretenses
in a split second. So she, and all women after her, had to be regarded as
second-class citizens in the Buddhist world. Pity.

> Not being particularly moved by either political or rhetorical
> correctness, much less by the New Age need to create mushy
> homongenized Oneness (especially where there is none in nature),
> I would question why it is you believe aging boomers will return
> to their indigenous religions.

On the basis of talking to several people who (unlike me) are
getting older, I get the impression that in later years, people
often try making sense of their entire lives, from childhood on to
older age. This means revisiting and re-evaluating childhood
experiences, impressions and ideas. One sees all those things from a
more mature perspective and naturally understands them in ways that
are, one hopes, wiser and richer in insight. As people look at the
religion of their childhood, they no longer see that religion as
they saw it as a child.

For many people who rejected their childhood religion as adolescents or
adults and took on some other religion, they realize as they get older
that perhaps what they should have rejected was just their childish
understanding of their religion rather than the entire religion. If they
go back and learn about the way wise and mature people have looked at the
religion of their childhood, then their childhood religion does not seem
quite so silly and worthy of rejection after all. So the obstacle to
acceptance of the childhood religion is removed, and meanwhile there is a
greater appreciation of maintaining a connection with the symbols, stories
and myths of one's early childhood. Understanding the stories one learned
as a child is the work of a lifetime, and that work is interrupted if one
insists on leaving those stories in the inaccessible past.

Some people who have spent an adulthood practising Buddhism end up gaining
deeper insights into themselves. Part of this insight for many people is a
realization that they have never really felt quite at home with Buddhist
mythology. They have learned to live with it perhaps, but it has not come
naturally, and it has required many adjustments. They may then realize
that all the mental and emotional gymnastics they had to perform to come
to a comfortable relationship with Buddhism could have been performed to
come to a comfortable relationship with the religion of their childhood.
Moreover, Buddhists, if their practice has gone well, get beyond the
emotional need both to depend on any particular dogma and to reject dogmas
wholesale. This expresses itself as a natural openness of both heart and
mind. And that openness often entails making peace with their childhood
religion, no matter how forcefully they may have rejected it in earlier
phases of their life.

> Freudian regressive behavior? Uneducability? Their "Buddhist
> phase" one of youthful rebellion? Their "Buddhism" the midlife crisis
> orientation of fashionable boomers? I'm sure there are lots of other
> possibilities.

The best explanation, I think, is wisdom and emotional maturity. If
Buddhism really works for people in the way promises to do, then people
can leave it behind without regrets. Of course, some people, even
Buddhists, manage to get arrested forever in adolescent patterns of
rejection. They remain around forever thumping their favourite canon.

> Pure Land theory echoes the Upanishidic yogic comprehension that
> all gods and goddess (even arrogant one's who capitalize god)
> are merely unconscious projects, akin to dreams, of endarkened
> human consciousness.

Can you cite some references? I don't recognize this as any Upanishadic
theory I have read. (I think you realize how parochially rooted in your
own culture you are being in your aside about gods who were arrogant
enough to capitalize "god".  No Indic language had any capital letters. So
the Indians are immune from the temptations to make distinctions between
god and God, self and Self, buddha and Buddha, freedom and Freedom,
liberation and Liberation, absolute and Absolute and even ken and Ken.)

> Presumably other forms of mahayana/vajrayana hold to a similiar
> gnosis or understanding, one in which literalism and
> fundamentalism has been 'seen through and risen above'.

There are serious practitioners in every religious tradition who rise
above literalism and fundamentalism. They are called "adults". They make
up the majority of religious practitioners on earth. There is a name for
people who believe that all practitioners of religions other than one's
own are childishly literalistic and fundamentalist. They are called
"bigots".

As amazing as it may seem, one can find bigots even among Buddhists. I
personally have encountered far more bigots among Western converts to
Buddhism than I have encountered in any other religious tradition. I think
there may be a reason for this.  The reason, I think, may be that when
people convert to Buddhism as adults they cut themselves off from their
own childhood without ever acquiring the childhood training of a Buddhist.
So they never quite attain maturity, either as a Westerner or as Buddhist.
They end up being, just as Carl Jung predicted, perpetual adolescents. (If
I may be permitted to say so, Ken, I think perpetual spiritual adolsecence
has happened to you. Big Time.)

> Is there a viable esoteric Christianity? Judaism? Islam?

Yes, of course, if one is prepared to look for it. People who have
bothered to look for viable forms of Buddhism can find viable forms
of these other religions with relative ease. People who get stuck in one
narrow and dogmatic form of Buddhism will naturally project that
narrowness onto everyone else as well.

>> I can honestly say I have no desire for anyone to be enlightened, for the
>> simple reason that I don't have the faintest idea what the word means.
>
>   I have often wondered that myself. How do you
> recognize one that has reached this state? Wouldn't
> you have to enlightened yourself? This begs the
> chicken and egg question, doesn't it.

Enlightenment is a red herring. Forget about it. It simply does not have a
place in Buddhism at all. What DOES have a place is nirvana, which is
defined as the absence of afflictive states. Nirvana, the absence of
afflictions, is the Dharma to which Buddhists go for refuge. There is
nothing in the least mysterious about it. We have all had a taste of it (I
hope!). We have all (unless we are teenagers) had moments, sometimes
hours, sometimes even weeks at a time when no passions, no anger and no
troubled states of any kind were evident. Just make that condition
permanent, and you have nirvana. It's so simple.

Can you tell whether someone else has attained nirvana? Sure. Kick him in
the knee, call him a raving unredeemable psychopath, and tell him you just
seduced his wife. If he shoots you, he hasn't attained nirvana yet. If he
smiles and wishes you peace and well-being, he may be pretty close to the
goal. Again, it is so very simple.

I just have no idea why people insist on making a big mysterious thing of
nirvana and other positive mental conditions discussed by Buddhists. I
suspect a big Christian mystical hangover of some kind. Is there a cure
for such a hangover? God only knows, and He doesn't exist to tell us the
answer. (He exists only to confuse us.)

> So I take "enlightenment" to be something more or less undefined.

So do I. That's why I find it a completely useless idea, one that has no
place in Buddhist thought.

> It will be what it is when I finally reach it.

If you don't know what it is, then how will you know you have reached it?
Don't you recall how the Buddha laughed at all those ascetic imbeciles who
were searching for the Golden Lustre? He compared them to a fatuous young
man who goes around saying he is in love with the most beautiful woman in
the world. When asked what she looks like, the young man can only say he
does not kn ow what she looks like, because he has never met her.
Fuzzy-minded people who pursue nebulous and ill-defined spiritual goals
are just like that crazy mixed up kid.

> I do have a bit of a definition of my own, but that is inadequate
> also.

Then discard it. It is useless. Instead of striving after the wind, strive
for what the Buddha recommended striving for: the cessation of avoidable
forms of pain.


> I define enlightenment as the best possible mode of consciousness
> possible given the basic laws of nature that apply to psychological
> structures/functions/etc.

You're completely hopeless. Why do you persist in cranking out these
complicated verbal formulae? Trying to impress your own ego? Look, just
drop all that crap and get down to the important business of getting rid
of anger and delusions.

> The best possible mode of consciousness exists by its own definition -
> (there must be a best possible mode of consciousness, whatever that
> might be).

In other words, despite the fact that the Ontological argument has been
known to be fallacious for well over a thousand years, you have fallen for
it.

> So in that way, I can look for something that is for the most part
> undefined, though whatever it is, it obviously exists.

Diseased thinking also exists. I have just seen a splendid example of it.
At least I hope you make yourself happy will all this verbiage you crank
out.

> However, many people don't want to delude themselves by arrogantly
> thinking and saying they have achieved (whatever one wants to call it)
> when they really haven't.

There is nothing arrogant about thinking that one is imperturbable when
one is in fact excitable. There may be a mistake in thinking such a thing,
but it is not a matter of arrogance. It is just a matter of being wrong
about how prone one is to experiencing dukkha. It is a mistake that
results in nothing more serious than occasional painful adjustments to
reality.

> There are a number of passages in Buddhist scriptures that warn
> against taking something as (whatever one calls it) which isn't there
> yet.

The warnings all have to do with monks making false claims of their
attainments to the laity. There is a reason for this. The laity were
trained to believe that the amount of merit they got for charity was
linked to the attainments of the recipient of the charity. Giving alms to
an arhant got the layman more merit than giving alms to an ordinary bozo
(p.rtghagjaana) like you and me. One time there was a severe famine, and
some crafty monks began claiming that they were arhants. Some pious layman
gave these monks food with the result that his own family starved to
death. When the Buddha heard of this, he was naturally appalled. He then
passed a rule saying that if any monk claimed to have attained to a higher
level of attainment than he had in fact attained, then he was to be
expelled from the monastic community FOR LIFE. This is a very serious
offense, one of the four most serious there is. But it pertains only to
monks who are in the position of receiving alms from pious lay people.

If you are not a monk and are not in any position to gain what you do not
deserve from others, then there is nothing wrong with making mistakes
about how close you have come to eradicating the root causes of dukkha.
The only thing "wrong" with it is that you may be unpleasantly surprised
by events someday.

> And of course, perhaps all of us have seen people who claim that they
> understand and have achieved (whatever one calls it), when they act
> like they really haven't.

Get this straight. Jim. I don't want to have to explain this to you again.
The goal of Buddhism has nothing whatsoever to do with gaining a higher or
deeper or more extensive understanding. It has nothing to do with
knowledge. It has to do with the elimination of dukkha. The only
connection it has with knowledge is that it is good to know that things
that seem to promise to make you happy will probably fail to keep their
promise, but (to steal a line from the move "Beyond Rangoon") "Suffering
is the one promise that life always keeps."

> Spiritual self-delusion and arrogance are major fears in mystical (or
> whatever one wants to call that) circles.

Yes, mystics are full of major fears about all sorts of things. Theirs is
a pathetic and tragic lot. But Buddhists, fortunately, are not mystics and
therefore have nothing to fear. Arrogance is an unpleasant quality in
those who have it, and it is probably an indication of insecurity, pain
and fear. So it is better not to have it. Delusion is undesirable only
because it hurts. That is why I keep trying to help you get over your
unfortunate delusion about the nature of Buddhism, which you persist in
thinking has to do with mystical gnosis that lies beyond the ken of people
with ordinary intellects. (Don't worry, Dr Newell, lots of people with
PhDs suffer from the same delusion. You have plenty of company)

>> If you are not a monk and are not in any position to gain what you do not
>> deserve from others, then there is nothing wrong with making mistakes
>> about how close you have come to eradicating the root causes of dukkha.
>> The only thing "wrong" with it is that you may be unpleasantly surprised
>> by events someday.
>
> I find this notion dangerous. I believe we *all* are in positions to gain
> from others what we do not deserve.

So when is the last time you walked into a health-food store and
said to the cashier "I'm a Stream-enterer. So do I get a discount on
the bean sprouts?" The more I think about this, the less I can see
how anyone is likely to get what she does not deserve by claiming to
be free of doubt about the nature of dukkha and its eradication, no
longer clinging to precepts and vows and beyond the view of an
enduring self. Is making a claim such as that ghoing to get her an
undeserved spot on the Oprah show, or an interview with Bill Moyers?

I think that making the mistaken claim to being a Stream Entrant is
far less to earn one undeserved cash or credit than falsely claiming
to have won a gold medal in bobsledding at the Olypic games, or
falsely claiming to have a PhD from University of Chicago, or
falsely claiming to have won a Nobel prize in economics, or falsely
claiming to have farily won the state of Florida in a US
presidential election. Indeed, I think the rewards for noising it
about that one is a Stream entrant are so meagre that it one runs
the risk of being charged with hyperbole to speak of "danger" of
making false claims.

> What is stronger evidence that there's nothing wrong with
> laypersons pretending to having eradicated the causes of dukkha
> is the fact that such claims are also not condemned in any of
> the suttas I can think of, even ones directed to laypersons.

There is a reason for that, I think. The reason is that it does no
one any harm at all when a layperson claims to be less prone to
dukkha than she really is. At the very worst, the layperson steps in
a wad of unexpected dukkha.

> I do hope my ignorance can be corrected here and someone can
> tell me the Buddha was concerned with this issue.

It would be a poor Buddha who worried about whether laypersons were
getting off on claiming to be less liable to experience dukkha than
they really are. (Mind you, he did worry about whether monks were
splashing each other in the bathing tanks. So he was capable of
worrying about trivial matters.)

> In Western Buddhism false claims by laypersons have the power to
> do great harm to selves and others.

Please give us some instances. What harm could possibly come to me
or anyone else if I were to say that I have significantly reduced
the amount of greed and anger in my consciousness continuum? (Making
such a claim could be construed as claiming to be a Once-returner.)

Buddhism is for losers. As Bruce Burrill pointed out very nicely, it is
all about letting go of views, greed, hatred and specific delusions about
what will work to make one contented. The more one loses, the less dukkha
one will have. It is not about attainments, not about getting anything.
And so in a society that tends to hate losers, I doubt very much that
anyone is going to be able to abuse others by claiming to be the sort of
loser that the Buddha invited us to be. Now if one starts talking about
things like Enlightenment (and other essentially New Age concepts), then I
can imagine that all sorts of abuse could come of people making false
claims about having attained Supernormal levels of understanding. There
are millions of suckers ready to gobble up that sort of garbage. And that
is one of the many reasons I hate to see people mixing Enligthenment talk
in with talk about Buddhism.


>> Does anyone know of any reactions from Buddhists to
>> Scientology...
>
> Depends on what you mean by a reaction. Does laughing so hard
> you fall off the sofa count?

Brian, your response made me laugh so hard, I almost fell out of my
high chair. Good thing the seat belt was fastened. Like you, I am
unaware of any other Buddhist responses to Scientology than the one
you mention. I have also never heard any response to the much more
serious claim made by some members of the Baha'i faith to the effect
that Bahu'allah (please forgive me if I have misplaced the
apostrophes in these words of foreign provenience) was the very
Maitreya that Buddhists are allegedly waiting to meet face to face.
The Baha'i claim is a pretty obvious attempt on the part of some
members of that movement to win converts by claiming that their
prophet perfectly matched the description of the long-awaited Jewish
Messiah, the second coming of Christ, the expected future Buddha and
the unreleased recordings of Elvis. He is, in short, the Second
Coming of Everybody. (I am personally convinced he was also the
pilot of the spaceship that crashed near Roswell, New Mexico in
1948.)

Many years ago I had a Baha'i graduate student who was determined to
write a thesis "proving" that Bahu'allah perfectly fit the
description of Maitreya. By the time she had done her homework,
however, she realized it wasn't quite so simple as that. A few years
later, however, I saw a very thick book (at least 500 pages,
probably more) in the Buddhism section of a big book store in
Singapore. The thesis of that book was that Bahu'allah had been
Maitreya, and it was chock full of quotations from various Buddhist
canons and from Baha'i scriptures. I mentioned to the manager of the
bookstore that this book had been placed on the wrong shelf, since
it was obviously a Baha'i polemical tract and not really a work on
Buddhism at all. For my well-intentioned efforts I got only a polite
shrug. (I suspect the manager realized the book would sell more
copies if shelved in the Buddhism section than if shelved with
Baha'i works.)

Andreas's question has made me aware of an absence. I cannot think
of any measured responses by Buddhists to people from other
religions who claim to be giving us the straight goods on what the
Buddha REALLY taught. About fifteen or twenty years ago I wrote a
letter of protest to the headquarters of the Rajneesh outfit when
they applied for a trademark right to the name "Zorba the Buddha"
for a chain of health-food restaurants. They had made the claim in
their trademark application that no Buddhist would be offended by
the name. I wrote and said I was not offended, but I did think it
was a source of potential confusion to Americans if the title Buddha
were conferred on a character like Zorba the Greek. (Since then, of
course, we have been treated to seeing Buddhist monks featured in
advertisements for such necessities of life as cell phones, cars,
toilet seats and casinos, and the Buddha once even appeared as a
centrefold in Hustler Magazine sporting an enormous erection. Maybe
they got him confused with Shiva.) "It's easy to see without lookin'
too far that not much is really sacred." (For all you old Bob Dylan
fans.)

Right now I'm putting the finishing touches on an anthology of my
best (and most appalling) writings to BUDDHA-L and other Internet
forums. One section of that contains a discussion way back in 1992
about the claim of Elizabeth Claire Prophet that she is a channel
for the Buddha. Elizabeth's Buddha has all kinds of interesting
things to say to modern Americans, hardly any of which would be
recognizable as Buddhist teachings to the average Buddhist.

My question then was the same as my question now: How are the claims
of Elizabeth Clair Prophet (or followers of the Baha'i faith, or
followers of Osho, or followers of Scientology) any different in
principle from the claims of the authors of the Lankavatara or the
Lotus Sutra, or compilers of Buddhist tantras, or gter-stons? The
answer is not at all as simple as it may first appear.

>> But Buddhists, fortunately, are not mystics and
>> therefore have nothing to fear.
>
> But I wonder if some Buddhists have been mystics in the sense
> you are talking about, introducing into the Dharma neo-platonic
> sorts of notions.

You are trying to get me to say "Sangharakshita," aren't you? You
are quite right. Edward Conze and Sangharakshita are two Western
Buddhists who come to mind as writers whose neo-Platonist visions
became woven into their understandings of Buddhism, often with
disastrous effects. (I use the term "disastrous" when I have a
strong emotional dislike of something but can't think of any valid
arguments against it.) I suspect there may be quite a few closet
neo-Platonists who have insinuated themselves into the ranks of the
insignificant handful of us who understand Buddhism correctly. So
what shall we do about them? Just keep breathing, I reckon, and wait
for them to be impermanent, like everything else.

> This reminded me of one of the early Sanskritists and
> Orientalists, Friedrich Max Mueller, who proposed the notion of
> myth (including its gods and goddesses) as diseased thought.

I think the term he used was "disease of language." As you say, his
thesis was that most religious belief stems from a disease of
language, by which he meant a failure to realize that words are
metaphors and stories are myths. By this disease of language, agni
goes from being plain old fire to Agni, the god of fire, and from
that to an eternal divine element that resides in all things and
gives them their creative force. Like you, I was always quite drawn
to that hypothesis. It makes about as much sense to me as anything
else anyone has ever said about religion.

I first heard of F. Max Mueller back when I was studying philosophy, in my
pre-Sanskrit days. I broke my mind over his translation of Kant's Critique
of Pure Reason. Some years later I learned (with great joy) that he was
not only a great Kant scholar but an Indologist. I suppose he had some
influence on those generations of Indians (I am thinking of fellows like
Das Gupta and T.R.V Murti) who eagerly showed all the correlations between
some Upanishidic and later Buddhist and Vedantin thinking with Kant and
Hegel. I think it might be a good idea to dust off some of F. Max
Mueller's musings and restudy them. It would be interesting to see what
today's philosophy students would make of him, now that it is a
realtively commonplace idea to speak of diseases in language.

> Your version looks fine. One group of Buddhas are
> self-enlightened, so it is certainly within the Buddhist
> teachings for you to take an individual, solitary course if you
> wish.

I can see you are struggling to get over your ugly and peristent
habit of speaking in terms of enlightenment. According to the
Buddhist literature I have spent my life studying, no buddha was
ever enlightened. All buddhas were, however, liberated from greed,
hatred and delusion. The pratyeka-buddhas, also known as
pratyayaka-buddhas, became liberated by understanding causal
conditions (pratyaya). ALL buddhas are said to be self-liberated
(which is how they differ from other arhants), so pratyeka-buddhas
are not unique in this respect.

> Or stated with somewhat different words, you should push
> yourself to the top quality in what you are doing.

Why? That is surely a form of what the Buddha called maana (pride,
arrogance). He described arrogance as the tendency to strive to the
be best. More specifically, he warned very strongly against comparing
oneself to others, seeing oneself as superior to others, inferior to
others or equal ot others in matters of what one has seen, figured out or
thought about. Now this, I take it, would be a warning against making such
fatuous claims as the  one that a Buddha has an understanding that
surpasses that of ordinary people. The Buddha never said that of himself.
So why should anyone else make that claim on his behalf?

Buddhism is nothing whatsoever to do with understanding. It is about being
rid of afflictions. It is sufficient to be rid of greed, hatred and
delusion and other causes of dukkha. There is no such thing as being
"better"  or "best" at having no dukhha. Having no dukkha comes in only
one degree, namely, having no dukkha. And that is all there is to the goal
of Buddhism, namely, having no dukkha.

> If your path is sitting meditation, you need to keep improving
> the quality of the way you sit.

Very bad advice, James Newell, PhD. If one's path inolves sitting, it is
sufficient just to sit in any old way until one's kilesas get tired of
waiting for an opportunity to strike. Then they just die off by
themselves. You needn't make any effort at all to keep improving the
quality of the way your sit. Just wait the afflictions out and starve
them to death by not giving them any more grand ideas to gobble up.

> If your path is transforming things here and there to a more
> spiritual essence, then you should give up trying to be a Buddhist and become a Catholic.

Keep working to improve your grasp of Buddhism, James Newell, PhD.
I fear you don't even have your foot through the front gate yet.

> You are certainly intelligent, from your posts, and you
> certainly must be well read.

Oh for God's sake, James F Newell, PhD, don't be so bloody
condescending. Neither intelligence nor learning have anything to do
with the issues we are discussing.

> In terms of the Buddhist literature, your statement is flat out
> wrong, but you are intelligent and well read, so I think this is
> a memory problem.

No, it's probably just that I'm stupid and poorly read. So, given my
density, I'm afraid you'll have to spell it out for me. Exactly
which of my statements are flat out wrong? And on what grounds do
you make such a bold claim?

> The Buddhist literature is that which talks about the technical
> aspects of meditating, and it involves things like mistaking a
> vision for something real, mistaking a state, such as a state of
> calm, for a higher state than it really is, etc. It has nothing
> to do with communicating to the laity.

Please name your sources. I have never seen anything even remotely like
what you are claiming. Now the literature of which I speak has only to do
with speaking to the laity. I am speaking, of course, of the vinaya.
You'll find what I am talking about there under the discussions of the
fourth rule of defeat. You'll find nothing there about meditation. You'll
find only discussions about claiming to be an arahant when one is not, or
claiming to be a stream-entrant when one is not. That is the only warning
I have ever seen against what might be something like pride. And pride was
the topic under discussion, was it not? You did say that all mystical
traditions have warnings against pride, did you not? And I did question
precisely that claim, did I not? I questioned it on the ground that there
is no evidence that Buddhist is in any sense of the term mystical. And I
have cited my sources. But I have seen no citations from you. All I have
seen is a great deal of unseemly blustering and posturing.

> This is of course your personal interpretation of Buddhism.

Well, not exactly. What I have reported is the story told in Kathaavatthu,
Milinda-pa~nha, Vimuttimagga and Visuddhimagga. It is also consistent with
everything said in the major abhidharma writings of Vasubandhu and the
philosophical writings of Dharmakiirti and most of his followers. So this
is hardly just my own personal interpretation. It is the interpretation of
some of the most learned Buddhists in history. And I suppose I agree with
most of what they have said on this issue.

> Other Buddhists and Buddhist teachings disagree with you.

No doubt. Buddhism is hardly monolithic. But I would appreciate it
if you would please name some names.

> Nirvana, like the orange taste example I mentioned earlier, is
> beyond any possible verbal theory.

Now it is you who are flat wrong. According to all the sources I have
studied, Nirvana is exactly nothing but the cessation of certain specified
afflictions. There. I said it in words, including a verb or two. So it is
not in the least beyond any possible verbal theory. Give up your obsession
with verbal theories and pre-verbal understanding and post-verbal wisdom.
It is all just so much bullshit and has nothing to do with Buddhism.

> By the way, many people distinguish knowledge and wisdom, with
> knowledge being communicable verbally and mathematically, and
> wisdom being too subtle to be fully communicable in those ways.

Who, for example? I have never seen anything like this in any
Buddhist text.

> When I am talking about the understanding part of Buddhism, I am
> talking about wisdom, not as you thought, about knowledge.

If you believe what you think you said, then you CAN'T talk about Wisdom
at all. Nobody can. So I have no choice but to engage you within the realm
of what we CAN, according to you, talk about. That is the realm of what
you choose to call knowledge. And that has led me to believe that you
don't really know what you are talking about but are certainly willing to
try to impress us with hints of some kind of wisdom that is superior to
mere knowledge. Of course, if you could provide some textual evidence
baking up some of your claims, I'd be happy to change my estimate.

Do you know how wisdom (praj~naa) is defined in Buddhist texts? It is
defined as dharma-pravicaya, the investigation of dharma. And that is said
to take place in several ways, one of which is studying texts, another of
which is refelcting on what texts say, and the third is on cultivating the
virtues that texts talk about. It all sounds pretty verbal to me. So where
does all this allegedly nonverbal stuff come into the picture?

> 5. The meditator/mystics who are concerned with changing their
> consciousness through internal work on themselves so as to become more
> spiritual, or whatever one calls it. They tend to ignore the myths and
> be interested in technical details of meditation and working on
> themselves. They are usually pretty rare. Even in Buddhism and
> Hinduism, only a very small percentage is in this group.

I think that is undeniably true for the most part. Where it is not true is
when one looks at a cross-section of recent converts to Hinduism and
Buddhism. There, I would say, it is no rarity to find people in this
category. One finds that close to 100% are concerned with almost nothing
but improving their character and the quality of their consciousness. As
I'm sure is true of many people on this list, I have heard several Asian
Buddhist teachers express great hope that the wave of Western converts
could have a very positive effect on the health of Buddhism, because most
new converts are dead serious about Dharma and have relatively little
interest in all the sideshows, such as earning merit. (Now that Buddhism
has become so fashionable in the West, this hope may be growing dimmer.)

One time I was at a Thai wat in Denver. The abbot there showed me the
central altar room, which was filled with dozens of lovely Thai Buddha
figures, all of them heavily gilt. I commented on how beautiful they were.
He leaned close to me and whispered "The Buddha himself would have hated
seeing all these statues of himself. He said this kind of thing is the
worst kind of superstition. They distract people from Dhamma. But Thai
people love superstition and don't care so much about Dhamma. Americans
who come here are hungry for Dhamma and don't care so much about statues."

As you know, I deplore the words "mystic" and "spiritual" in a Buddhist
context, but if all you mean by "mystic" is a meditator, and all you mean
by a "spiritual" is someone who seeks to be a better human being, then I
can live with those terms as you have redefined them, although I think it
leads to serious confusion to be so careless in one's use of technical
terminology. Both those words, "spiritual" and "mystic", have very
particular meanings within Christianity and lose their meaning when
exported into different religious systems. Speaking of Buddhist mysticism
makes no more sense to me than speaking of Christian views of nirvana or
talking about the feathers of a fish. So I prefer to use Buddhist
terminology when speaking about Buddhism. (So you see, one can be BOTH a
scholar AND a serious meditator; one can belong to more than one of your
five categories at once.)

It may be time for you to reread Spiro's wonderful book _Buddhism and
Society_, in which he describes three categories of Burmese Buddhist. The
first category is those seeking nibbana. The second is those seeking to
purify kamma. The third is those seeking to ward off disasters through
talismans and spells. Having made those three distinct categories, Spiro
goes on to say that every Burmese Buddhist falls into all three of them,
for Burmese Buddhism is the result of all those approaches to religion
being so thoroughly blended together than it is impossible for anyone to
sort them out in any practical way (even if one can sort them out
theoretically). I suspect the same is true of the five categories you have
offered us.

Happy Wesak to you and everyone else. Rather than going to the local Thai
temple and watching people wolf down blue rice and curried chicken, I plan
to celebrate by going down to the banks of the Rio Grande with my lovely
yogini and sitting under a big old cottonwood tree to watch the river
flow. If we're very lucky, we'll see a roadrunner.

> If there is nothing particular to be known or understood when
> attaining enlightenment, then exactly what is seen on the path of
> seeing?

This termonology comes from Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakosha, fifth chapter.
According to this text, certain afflictions (kles'as) are eliminated by
direct experience of suffering. When one experiences, for example, the
pain involved in being angry, and when one makes the connection between
the anger and its resultant pain, then one is inclined to stop being
angry. At least, one's tendency to be angry is reduced. That is the path
of seeing. The path of cultivation (bhhavanaa) involves the cultivation of
certain dhaarmas that are antidotes to painful ones. So for example one
might cultivate friendship as a means of counteracting anger.

> I always understood that on the bodhisattva path, emptiness is seen as
> a direct experience and not merely understood conceptually.

Emptiness is nothing but dependent origination. So when one sees the cause
of a particular kind of pain, such as that which is a consequence of
anger, one also sees that anger is impermanent. Then one can do something
about it. That is the essence of dependent origination, for which a poetic
name is emptiness.

> This certainly sounds to me like some sort of gnosis or (dare I say
> it?) mystical experience and not merely the reduction of kleshas
> Richard speaks of.

Seeing that anger causes pain and then eliminating anger does not sound at
all mystical to me. It sounds like reducing the kleshas. When one has
eliminated all of them, that is called nirvana. See Abhidharmakosha
chapter one.

> In addition, Paul has to teach Buddhism at university level. How
> can he do this now if he doesn't rate it? Has there ever been an
> effective Buddhist scholar who was not also a practitioner?

Names like Th. Stcherbatsky, Louis de La Vallee Poussin, Etienne
Lamotte, Erich Frauwallner, Ernst Steinkellner, Oskar von Hinueber,
Christian Lindtner, Steve Collins and Paul Griffiths come readily to
mind. And now we can add Paul Williams to that list. All of these
scholars are, in my estimation, top drawer scholars of Buddhism.
They don't get any better than those people. None of them is a
Buddhist in the sense of having gone for refuge to the three jewels.
But all are practitioners of Dharma, I would say, as Dharma was
understood by Naagasena in the Questions of King Milinda.
Naagasena said that anyone who strives to minimize harm, maximize
good and keep a clear head is a Dharma practitioner and has a good
shot at nirvana. Being a Buddhist, in the narrow sectarian sense of
the word, really does not matter in the least. Indeed, if going for
refuge results only in having a negative attitude toward other
religions, then one has not adequately heed the Buddha's dictum that
any view that makes one have contempt for others is a form of
bondage.

> Seems to me to be impossible because what little I know about
> Buddhism tells me that it does'nt work if it doesn't involve
> experience.

Who hasn't experienced dukkha? And who hasn't had some success in
eliminating it? If one has had that experience, one knows everything
one needs to know to present Buddhism authentically and accurately.

> And Creator God? How could anyone who's familiar with Nagarjuna
> etc:, who's actually exzperienced glimpses of clarity and
> emptiness, go back to that stuff?

Well, I should imagine one who had experienced glimpses of clarity
would go back to God with a clearer mind, a mind capable of seeing
God as an adult and not as a self-centred child. Clarity is clarity.

> There's my post-retreat, Happy Wesak sermon over and done with.

Thanks for the sermon, Mary. But I'm afraid you're still coming
across more as a resentful ex-Catholic than as a contented and
open-minded Buddhist. May I suggest doing fewer retreats?

Is there a Buddhist equivalent of Boxing Day? If not, Happy
Day-after-Wesak!

> It's about Paul Williams conversion.
> Anybody have the details on why he converts? Could you share with us?
> Maybe we can discuss whether it is a valid reason.

I can imagine nothing more offensive and obscene than discussing the
"validity" of another person's religious conversion. Let it be known that
such a topic is entirely outside the boundaries of what this list is
intended for. The only use I can see for further discussion of a topic like
this is to help benighted Buddhists get over their unfortunate tendencies to
be shocked and uncomprehending when an intelligent and thoughtful human
being leaves Buddhism for a religion that he or she finds more personally
fulfilling.

> I have never been happy with "wisdom" as a translation of
> praj~naa, especially in light of the standard definition you
> quote -- it seems too static while pravicaya implies an active
> discriminating.

Yes, I agree. On the other hand (I have as many hands as an octopus
and so can almost always find another one somewhere), praj~naa is
also often glossed as nis'caya, which also implies result rather
than process. Nis'caya itself is hard to translate, but it usually
implies some sort of deep conviction and fixity of belief, a fixity
that brooks no further need for investigation. I am inclined to
agree with an observation that Paul Williams made in his book
Mahayana Buddhism to the effect that fixity of conviction is just
about exactly the opposite of what we usually mean by wisdom. What
is wrong with the world, observed Paul, is that there is far too
much praj~naa (in the sense of fixity of belief) and far too little
wisdom.

I see in that observation by Paul Williams a good deal of insight
into the agenda of much of Buddhist scholasticism (and, perhaps to
an equal degree, various anti-scholastic contemplative traditions).
It also gives us an insight, I think, into why he became
disillusiond with Buddhism. It was, I would argue, a healthy
disillusionment, one that came from realizing that his standards had
become impossibly high. He found himself seeking a tradition based
on intellectual rigour and integrity, and openness of both heart and
mind. For some time he (like many of us) thought he had found it in
Buddhism. As a rsult of doing far more extensive reading than most
of us manage to do, what Paul found more and more in Buddhism was
pretty much exactly what people find everywhere else in religious
literature: a systematic closing of both the mind and the heart,
accompanied by a triumphalism and smugness. If one is willing to put
up with that in a tradition to which one has converted as an adult,
then one might as well put up with it in a tradition that at least
speaks to one's heart and one's childhood conditioning. In other
words, Paul Williams left Buddhism not because he didn't understand
it very well but because he came to understand it a little too well.
When he saw things as they really are (yathaa-bhuuta-dars'anam), he
saw that Buddhism really has no edge on anything else and that one's
faith in it is every bit as arbitrary as one's faith in anything
else might be. But enough of Paul. Back to "wisdom".

> Also, if you go for "wisdom" = "praj~naa", how do you translate
> "j~naana" as in "buddha-j~naana" ?  Actually, I don't much like
> "wisdom" for "j~naana" either.

I usually resort to the very neutral word "cognition" for jn~aana.
The word "cognition" does not imply truth or falsity or fact or
fiction, but is meant to be a purely neutral term for the way that
one experiences things.  Buddha-j~naana, as I think about it, is
just the way a buddha experiences the world, which is pretty much
exactly the same as the way you and I experience it, minus the
tendency to cling to "I" and "mine" and minus the tendency to take
one's own experiences and thoughts and teachings as the standard by
which to judge all other experiences, thoughts and teachings. This
is a VERY important difference, I maintain, but the difference lies
not in the nature of what is known as much as in the degree of
self-importance that one attaches to oneself for knowing it. The
liniting case, of course, is zero attachment, for which we have the
fine word "nirvaa.na" in Buddhism.

>   But maybe that's just me :)

Honestly, Stephen. Me, me, me! I should think that after all these
years you would realise that precisely what "it" is not is just you.

> "the Yogin is liable to be ... assailed by hallucinations of various
> natures... nervous derangement. Yogin is advised to guard himself against
> them" Manual of Zen Buddhism. D. T. Susuki
>
> So there are warnings about false meditative states in the Buddhist
> literature.

Well, yes. I don't think anyone has ever questioned that. Now,
perhaps you can "enlighten" me as to what the relevance of these
quotes is to the discussion we were having earlier.

Let me recapitulate the discussion as I understand it. I said that
there is no need to go chasing after extraordinary understanding,
since perfectly ordinary understanding (minus attachments to self)
is quite sufficient. Then you replied, somewhat incongruously, by
saying that all mystical traditions warn people against pride. I
responded by saying that Buddhism is not a mystical tradition. (That
was, I admit, a rather terse statement. What I meant was that pride
is usually defined in mystical and spiritual traditions as the
thought that one can do what needs to be done by oneself, without
divine guidance. Humanism is, to mystics and spiritualists, the very
embodiment of pride.In that sense, Buddhism is all about cultivating
pride. The more the better. In other words, what Buddhism warns
against is not the sort of pride against which mystics warn;
rather, what Buddhists warn about is 1) making false claims to the
laity about one's proximity to nirvaa.na, and 2) delusions of
various kinds that come about through sloppy thinking and through
placing far too much importance one one's meditative experiences.)

And now you, once again with dazzlingly puzzling incongruity, bring
up references to hallucinations that one might experience while
meditating. This quotation, along with all the others you have given
us, seems to me only to reinforce the very point I was making from
the beginning, which was that when people claim to be having
extraordinary experiences or extraordinary insights, they are, from
a Buddhist point of view, invariably playing a fool's game. Why?
Because the task at hand in Buddhism is not to have peak experiences
but to rid oneself of the painful tendency to attach importance to
ANY of our experiences, views, understandings and ways of seeing,
whether they be peak experiences, valley experiences or great
plains experiences.

It wears me out trying to following the meandering of your overly
active mind, Doctor. It is, by the way, this tendency your thought
has to slither around and climb back on top of itself like a snake
that prompted me earlier to describe your thinking as diseased. I
meant no harm in the statement. I was merely trying to help. Alas,
all my offer of help seems to have done is to get you all defensive
and deeper into counterproductive prapa~nca. Sorry about that. (Now
you see why I'm a mere philosophy professor and not an Ascended
Master.)

So let's start again from square one. What exactly are you on about,
Jimmy me boy? In what discipline did you get your PhD? And how is it
that you expect that all your fancy thinking is going to help reduce
all the pointless suffering in the world?

> The American orientation is towards meditation, but the number
> of people at a particular meditation center who are really
> trying is a minority.

And just exactly how is it that you arrive at this conclusion?

> A lot of people are interested in meditating only from time to
> time, as at an intensive, rather than integrating meditation
> into their entire lives.

Do you know where I have heard this kind of grand proclamation
before? I have heard such things said by people who have just rented
an expensive space for a yoga studio or a meditation facility and
have noticed with great alarm the day before the rent is due that
not enough epople are coming to pay the rent. This then leads them
to say "Gosh, if people aren't coming to my meditation centre, they
must be mere dilletants dabbling in the Dharma without any serious
intentions." That MAY be the right explanation. Another explanation
could be that people have gotten so good at integrating
meditation into their entire lives that they have no further need of
setting aside a special time and place to do their meditation
practice. When one can meditate while riding a bicycle or eating a
taco, why does she need to go to a mditation centre?

There is no telling from external behaviour what is going on inside
another person's mind. That is perhaps why the Buddha reportedly
warned people not to presume to know what is going on in the minds
and hearts of others. I think that was very good advice. I think you
seriously need to give more thought to that advice and less thought
to why other people are or are not meditating in just the way you
seem to think they should be meditating.

> By the way, trying for the highest quality doesn't necessarily
> mean struggling. It can mean the highest quality of relaxing,
> for example. And it certainly means the highest quality of not
> being attached.

For some reason, this reminds me of the fellow who said "In regards
to humility, I am surpassed by no one."

> "Taking Refuge" is a common expression in Buddhist circles. Can
> anyone tell me the original Pali or Sanskrit for this phrase. Is
> everyone satisfied with this translation?

Sara.na-gamanam is the Pali expression that means going (gamanam)
for refuge (sara.nam).  It is more customary to speak of going for
refuge than taking it, although I'm not sure sure the verb matters.

As for the refuge part, the word so translated has many meanings,
among which Apte's Sanskrit-English dictionary gives these:
protection, help, defence, refuge, shelter, resort, asylum,
sanctuary. I prefer saying "I go to the Buddha for refuge" than, for
example, "I commit myself to the Buddha's asylum." On the other
hand, the environmentalist in me rather likes the sound of "I am
going to the buddha sanctuary."

> So, IS Buddhism ''a form of spiritual auto-eroticism"?

Yes, I think it most unquestionably is. What is the erotic? It is
the realm of Eros, the Greek god of love and of the arts and of
creativity. In psychoanalytic theory, Eros is described as the sum
total of all those instincts that create as opposed to those that
destroy. So Buddhist practice, which is aimed at increasing our love
for all sentient beings and preserving the good and eliminating the
harmful, is decidedly erotic in nature. Moreover, it is a path of
self-reliance, rather than of reliance on others. And so it really
is auto-erotic. Ratzinger was correct in describing Buddhism in that
way. He was also correct in seeing that self-reliance movements are
a threat to the continued survival of religions that place a
strong emphasis on the role of an ecclesial body (a Church) as a
mediator between helpless Man (if you'll pardon my gender-exclusive
noun, which I mean to be understood inclusively) and Man's source of
redemption.

Frankly, I think anyone who is really honest is bound to question
the limits of self-reliance. (All I have to do is think of how many
times I quit smoking before I finally quit smoking.) Changing
oneself by oneself is very difficult and more often than not quite
unsuccessful. So it is not surprising to see an honest and
reflective person turn to some kind of what some Buddhists call
Other-power. Belief in an Other is all it takes to help some people
finally achieve what they did not believe they could achieve by
themselves. This happens all the time. I'm sure we have all
witnessed it.

Now if one is a philosopher, one might very well be tempted to ask
whether there really is an Other that helps those who believe there
is an Other, or whether the belief is a happy delusion of some kind
that just happens to produce the desired results by enabling one to
overcome whatever was formerly preventing one from helping oneself.
A wise philosopher resists the temptation to try to answer such
questions, because she knows nothing of importance hinges on
getting a correct answer.

> I like Alexander Berzin's term - 'safe direction'. The word 'refuge'
> brings the wrong images to my mind.

You are not the first person I have encountered who has a negative
reaction to the word "refuge". Some people have told me they associate it
with refugees. But that is exactly the right association, I think. One
goes for refuge to someone when one's own resources have run out and one
needs help from another. Only if one is sufficiently troubled (dukkhita)
does one seek refuge (sara.nam) in someone who can help one get out of
trouble.

> I appreciated Richard Hayes' valiant attempt to attribute some
> charitable interpretation to Cardinal Ratzinger's remarks about
> Buddhism, although I still think the good Cardinal simply
> intended to be disrespectful to the competition.

Alas, I am pretty sure you are right about the good Cardinal's
intentions. Please forgive me my perverse tendency to twist people's
words in such a way as to make them sound reasonable when their
authors have betrayed their all-too-human nature.

> When one is young, one wants to establish oneself in the world,
> so one goes forth as a warrior to win glory and esteem.
> Somewhere in midlife, however, one finds that the body begins to
> sag and become uncooperative, and the things one wishes to do
> require the help of others.

That is all true enough, although in my case, my body was quite a
bit less cooperative when I was younger than it is now. At least
nowadays I can get it to do what it needs to do to stay healthy,
whereas when I was young my belief in my own immortality prevented
me from taking care of myself and even encouraged a degree of abuse
that now shocks me.

> I think these Chan masters simply found that their early
> enlightenment experiences didn't save them from all life's woes
> after all, they came to doubt that they could ever overcome each
> and every subtle klesa all by themselves, and decided there was
> no shame in asking for some help.

That may be part of it. There is more, however. Again, permit me to
draw on my own very ordinary experiences -- I have never in my life
had a "peak experience" (except when I have driven up to the top of
my favourite mountains), nor have I ever been tempted to see any
degree of "enlightenment" in anything I have ever done, so all I can
draw upon is most ordinary. For reasons that completely defy my
understanding, I have become unreasonably happy in midlife, far more
happy that I can possibly attribute to my own efforts. This
happiness simply feels like a gift, something I have received
without in the least deserving it. It feels, in short, like grace.
And this has instilled in me an emotional need to find someone to
thank for all the blessings I have received. It feels as if, since I
have fallen to my knees to offer my thanks anyway, I might as well
offer it to someone other than my own ego. And this, I feel, has
been the genesis of my own gravitation in recent years to the
language of Other-power.

Once my thoughts turned in reverence to such figures as Amitaabha,
it was not at all difficult to turn also to dozens of other figures
from both history and myth. And so it is that I can be found down at
the local church lighting candles and kneeling before a statue of
the blessed virgin, just because I respond so deeply to the look of
a young woman taking loving care of an innocent child. Then I might
even invoke the help of Saint Ignatius (helper of those prone to
falling prey to the sins of srupulosity overconscientiousness). I
cannot resist lighting a candle to Saint Francis, whose famous
prayer moves me as deeply as anything I have ever read. I love doing
this, and I find myself loving the other people who are doing the
same thing. Sure, I'd be just as happy making offerings to statues
of Brahma or Vishnu or Shiva or Krishna, or to any number of
Buddhist figures such as Amitaabha or Guanyin, but the Catholic
church happens to be a lot closer, and I love the atmosphere there.

And I have to say I genuinely pity my poor brothers and sisters in
the FWBO who feel that there is something fundamentally incompatible
about Buddhism and theistic religions. Theirs seems such a shallow
and lietaralist and unimaginative view, not so different from the
cramped mentality they falsely imagine most theists to have.

> Personally, I'm glad my "warrior" days are over.

Very well said. I am in complete agreement with you. (Mind you, I
still carry a dagger to give a quick jab to a bloated ego now and
then, whether it's mine or someone else's. But I no longer enjoy
the rushing sound of escaping hot gas as much as I once did.)

> Just round the corner from our Centre, there's a Women's Refuge.
> It's a place already prepared for them. They flee from domestic
> violence, and a group of kind-hearted people look after them. This is
> not the image that I associate with Buddhist refuge.

That's interesting. It's precisely the image I associate with Buddhist
refuge. The word s'ara.nam is said by grammarians to be derived from the
verb s'.r.r, which means to destroy, to tear apart, to abuse. The related
participle s'ara.nya means vulnerable, in need of protection. And
s'ara.nam itself is that which offers protection against abuse and
violence. So the woman's refuge is precisely the right kind of metaphor to
depict the act of going for refuge to the Buddha, the Dharma and the
Sangha.

> Then there is the meaning of 'refugee' to consider - someone who 'flies'
> from trouble.

Yes, exactly. One is running away from dukkha (which is best translated as
"trouble").

> The connotation is one of getting away rather than running towards- a
> sort of scattering. Buddhist refuge has a focus.

Why see it as either-or? Surely when one is fleeing away from trouble one
is running toward something that one feels is safer than the trouble from
which one is running. So when one is running away from dukkha, one runs
toward something that one hopes will relieve it. Some take refuge in
alcohol or drugs or anti-depressants or entertainment or sex or real and
imagined personal achievements. Some discover that those refuges don't
provide much relief, so they keep running until they find something that
does provide relief. Refuge is always provisional and tentative. It's a
gamble. One can never be sure one's most recent refuge will really be a
safe place. This is as true as the triple refuge as with any other.

> Although one seeks liberation from dukkha, there's more of a
> 'direction towards' than a scatter.

I'm not convinced this is so. Most people I know are pretty scattered when
they take refuge. Years later they may look back and feel they were in
sharp focus from the very beginning, but a moment's reflection will
usually show that is not the case. After all, if they had been in focus
from the very beginning, they would not have needed to go for refuge.

> As an aside, I remember when I spoke to Paul Williams shortly after
> his change of course. He said he just had to ask himself how he really
> felt in times of need. His natural tendency was to ask God for help -
> and it was something he couldn't just dismiss. That was where he
> turned. This was his 'direction'.

A very wise move, I think. It would be foolish to deny such instincts in
oneself as to which direction one should run for refuge. In my own case, I
am fairly sure this has something to do with why I have always been an
unrepentant humanist. Whenever I have been in need, I have always asked a
human being for help, and have nearly always received it. That is my
direction. That is why my Buddha has always been a very ordinary human
being with none of the characteristics of a superhuman being. I have just
never felt a need to turn in that direction. It is very easy for me to
understand, however, how someone else could have a very different
direction to which they flee for refuge than my own.

> Maybe this is a question we could all ask of ourselves. I've never come
> up with an answer. It's still on my in-tray.

May you never find an answer. Answers are the death of wisdom.

> Couldn't it be that the point in "seeking refuge" is rather to
> acknowledge to oneself that the Buddha, the teaching, and the
> holy assembly *are* the safe haven?

Jan, I am quite unfamiliar with Tibetan writings on this topic, but
your observation prompts me to ask a question in the light of the
studies of refuge I have made in Theravada sources and in the
Abhidharmakos'a (the school of which I regard as unknowable). In the
literature I am familiar with it is made very clear that the Buddha
to which one goes for refuge is not an historical person but rather
the thirty-seven bodhipak.sas. And the Dharma of refuge is not the
teachings of the Buddha or anyone else but Nirvana. And the Sangha
is not the Buddhist community but rather all aarya-pudgala, who are
the stream-entrants, once-returners, never-returners and arhants.
These in turn are not to be understood in personal terms but as sets
of wholesome dharmas. What this means is that what a Buddhist is
going to fo refuge is a set of ideals that the refugee is striving
not just to admire but to acquire. To some extent, I think, this
understanding supports what Mike Austin has been saying about a
direction as opposed to an already-existing haven. On the other
hand, I also agree with you that the usual understanding of a person
going for refuge is that these ideals (the Buddha, the Dharma and
the Sangha of refuge) are ones that have been realized and therefore
can be realized again. In other words, nirvana, the Dharma-refuge,
is a realistic goal because it actually has been attained by someone
who was once just as broken down and hopeless as the refugee.

On the whole, I am inclined to prefer the rather literal translation
"going for refuge", because "going" implies activity and process and
"refuge" says everything that needs to be said about being in
trouble now and knowing that there is an asylum from all those
troubles if one can just somehow do what needs to be done to go from
here (danger) to there (safety).

> Is not the self/other boundary the result of an atta-vada, a
> belief in Self?

Yes, of course. But I do not see that as a problem at all from a
Buddhist perspective. Let me try to explain why. (I'll offer a very
clumsy explanation in the hopes that someone more skillful will come
along and offer an improved version or a better alternative.)

The question in Buddhism, as I understand it, is not whether one
should believe in a self at all but rather how should one best
describe the self so as to minimize (even eliminate) the unnecessary
and avoidable kinds of dukkha that attend having an unviable view of
self. It would be daft (or, as we might now say, psychotic) not to
have SOME sense of self and therefore some sense of other. Having
said that, it is important to realize just what kind of self one
has.

The Buddhist answer, it seems to me, is that when one thinks of the
self as absolute, fixed, static, invariable, independent, permanent
and impermeable, then one is prone to experiencing all kinds of
trouble (dukkha), and one is also prone to creating all kinds of
trouble for others. But when one comes to see that the self is a
work in progress, constantly interacting with and influenced by
others and therefore always evolving and lacking any fixed and
permanent boundaries, and when one sees that what yesterday was
other is now very much a part of oneself and may tomorrow be other
again, then troubles decline dramatically. (I find helpful an image
from the writings of William James, who said that he experiences the
self as being like a current in a river, whereas most of what he
has read seems to depict selves as barrels of water tied together.)

And so in a sense Buddhism seems to me to take a psychological
middle path between two kinds of psychosis. One form of psychosis
might come from having such a weak ego (sense of self) that one
cannot function very well at all because of a lack of
self-confidence and a lack of self-worth, while the other might come
from having such a strong ego that one cannot see anything but
oneself and therefore cannot recognize that there really are others
who differ from oneself and who, despite not being just like
oneself, have a legitimate place in the world. The middle ground is
not to have no ego (self) at all but rather to have a healthy ego, a
self that knows its present boundaries but also knows that those
boundaries, like the frontiers of nations, are always changing.

> Another, unrelated bit that always tickled me: The critics also
> charged the Purelanders with violating nonduality in their distinction
> of the "pure" land from this "impure" land. Purity and impurity, they
> said, are just another false dualism to be critiqued and dismissed.

Thanks for this piece, Charles. It serves to remind me that one of the
many things I have to be grateful for is that I have never been tempted to
reject dualism. I freely admit that there are two kinds of people in this
world, those who believe there are two kinds of people and those who
don't. It has always been quite obvious to me that dualists are on the
whole quite a bit more intelligent and spiritually gifted than
non-dualists.

I also cling adamantly (but without any pain whatsoever) to the view that
there are two kinds of dichotomy in the world, good ones and bad ones, and
that early Buddhist texts recommended rejecting the bad ones and keeping
the good ones. How it came to be that dualism as such came to be seen as
an absolute delusion by some Budhists is not at all clear to me. Even less
clear is how such a counterproductive idea as non-dualism survived for
more than about ten minutes. (I suspect non-dualism may have been a
terrorist plot to undermine clear thinking in the Buddhist world.)

> my newest teacher, Lama Yeshe, wants me to now give up thinking,

I don't know about you, Jim, but I have never yet encountered a
situation that was improved by abandoning thinking. Indeed, most of
the mess the world is in seems to me to stem from people giving up
thinking prematurely. I also have yet to encounter a situation that
was not improved, at least slightly, by people thinking more
clearly. So perhaps what one needs to do is to continue thinking but
to do it well and about the right things.

The Buddhist literature I have spent most of my adult life
studying and translating places a strong emphasis on the importance
of yoniso manasikaara. This term is translated in various ways. The
easy part to translate is manasikaara, which just means thinking.
The adverbial part, yoniso, literally means something like "from the
source". In a Buddhist context, what this refers to is thinking
about the sources of our experiences, the building blocks of
experience. The most basic sources are our senses.

Nothing at all can be thought unless it is in some way or another
grounded in sensory experience. But yoniso manasikaara means much
more (or perhaps much less) than thinking about what we see, hear,
smell, taste, touch and experience internally in the form of
pleasure, pain, elation, depression, satisfaction, guilt and so
forth. What it really means is thinking about these things in
impersonal terms and without attachment.

The opposite of yoniso manasikaara is ayoniso manasikaara, which
consists in thinking of experiences as one's own. It is thinking
that places oneself at the centre of everything and attaches great
importance to one's personal place in the overall scheme of things.
If one simply notes the existence of, let's say for example, a
headache or a bout of depression, and if one simply accepts it and
sees the various ways this pain is flavouring the way various things
feel at the moment, then that reflection on all the ways in which
the headache or the depression is influencing how things are
experienced is yoniso manasikaara. But if one thinks of the
depression or the headache as MY affliction, something that is
making ME suffer, something that has made ME a victim, then one is
indulging in ayoniso manasikaara.  And this, it is said, magnifies
and intensifies the pain of the headache or the depression. It may
even make the pain slightly contagious, so that what began as MY
headache or depression makes other people I deal with also
experience a headache or depression. Then instead of simply having a
headache you become a headache to others.

Ayoniso manasikaara (which some folks have translated as "diseased
thinking") comes in several flavours. One species of ayoniso
manasikaara is called prapanca. Prapanca is defined as the thinking
that one does to sustain a view in the face of evidence that
apparently challenges the view. I like to think of prapanca as
intellectual damage control. It's the sort of thing we do when we
are attached to a theory and feel reluctant to abandon it, even when
our experience or reasoning is beginning to show that the theory is
flawed. Most intellectuals are prone to bouts of prapanca. It is the
disease of choice among those who are (or who think they are) very
intelligent.

I am hoping that what your lama was suggesting was that you give up
ayoniso manasikaara and prapanca. (This, I think, would be excellent
advice in general, and perhaps, based on his observation of you,
very good advice for you in particular.) If he was suggesting giving
up ALL thinking, then may I humbly suggest that you seek an
alternative lama. Or at least ask him what on earth he expects you
to do instead of all the thinking you now do.

>  and I really do think the human situation is now probably
> hopeless.

Of course it is. We're all going to die eventually in some way or
another. And until every last one of us is dead, we will probably
collectively make every bit as much a mess of things as we have
since the beginning of recorded history (and, one suspects, for many
millennia before someone got the bright idea to record human
events). The human situation is perfectly hopeless. Always has been.
But so what? On the way to doom we can probably all expect to see a
beautiful flower or two, a few butterflies and maybe a hummingbird.
Some of us may even meet the perfect lover for us. And if one can
get a glimpse of things like that on the way to ruination, just how
terrible can our demise be anyway?

As far as I can see, nothing much is gained by anyone posting his or
her ideas to BUDDHA-L. But then, no great harm is done by it either.
So if posting your thoughts helps you think better, then by all
means continue to post. That's what most of us are doing here. If
posting here increases only the quantity of your thoughts but not
the quality, then perhaps it is not such a good idea for you to
post. But rest assured your posting here is not doing anyone else
any great harm.

> In short, I think *ideally* a term should always be translated
> in the same way, not "refuge" when translating for beginners and
> "safe direction" are "impersonal wholesome dharmas" when
> adressing others. Leave the commenting to the commentators (or
> to the good old footnotes)!

Yes, with this I am in full agreement. It is not without reason that
traditions have both texts and preachers. The job of the latter is
to make sense of the former to whatever audience happens to be at
hand. So for that reason, I am with you in much preferring "going
for refuge" as a textual and liturgical translation. Leave it to the
preachers to explain that going for refuge means going in a safe
direction for help and guidance and does not mean escapism or
having a defeatist attitude.

Of course, it would also be nice if the preachers themselves were
safe directions for vulnerable people to go in, but that is an
altogether different (and much more painful) topic.

> It is my view that I cannot currently assert to, or access,
> Buddha.

That is precisely why the Buddha refuge is pretty well universally
understood by scholastics to be the ten mental qualities that make
anyone who has them a buddha. No one can have access to the
historical buddha who founded the current dispensation (saasana),
but anyone can have access to the ten mental qualities.

> But the idea that Tibetans rigidly adopted a one-to-one
> technique of translation can be exaggerated.  There are many
> cases where they adopt several renderings for the one Sanskrit
> term, perhaps to tease out nuances -- thus "svabhaava" is often
> "rang-bzhin" but also "ngo-bo-nyid".

For years I have kept track of how technical terms (and perfectly
ordinary words) in the works of Dharmakiirti were rendered into
Tibetan. In the Svaarthaanumaana section of Pramaa.navaarttika, for
example, "svabhaava" is translated as "rang bzhin", "rang gi ngo
bo", "ngo bo" and "ngo bo nyid". I am not yet aware of any subtle
nuances in the Sanskrit that are being captured by four different
ways of rendering "svabhaava" as Dharmakiirti uses the word.

Sometimes the Tibetan translators were very careful to distinguish
between two obviously different senses of a word. Of help
to me has been the careful distinction Tibetan translators made
between "hetu" as a cause of coming into being, which they
invariably translated as "rgyu", and "hetu" as a cause of knowing,
which is translated "gtan tshigs". Similarly, when "nimitta" means a
cause of coming into being, it is translated as "rgyu", but when it
means a sign or makr it is rendered "rgyu mtshan". When "pratyaya"
means a cognition it is rendered "shes pa", but when it means a
causal factor it is translated as "rkyen".

Because Sanskrit has a much richer vocabulary than Tibetan, it is
common to find a single Tibetan word doing service for a variety of
Sanskrit words. Thus "me" stands for "agni", "vahni" and "dahana";
"rgyu" is used for "kaara.na", "nimita" and "hetu". This makes
reconstruction of a Sanskrit text from a Tibetan translation for
which the original is lost a real problem. (My painstaking attempts
to translate two chapters of Dignaaga's Pramaa.na-samuccaya from two
wildly different Tibetan translations is a testimony mostly to my
folly. A huge amount of work was rendered obsolete my the discovery
of a copy of the Sanskrit commentary to the PS, which made it very
clear what the original words of Dignaaga's text had been.)

> Personally, for certain key terms, I prefer to keep the Sanskrit
> when the range of meanings is too complex for one English etc
> word to capture.

So do I. This drives some of my students crazy, because they are
likely to be subjected to a couple of hundred Sanskrit words in the
course of a semester, simply because I have long since given up
trying to be consistent in how I translate such words as ruupa,
skandha, sa.mskaara, dharma, s'iila and a very long list of et
ceteras.

> It seems to be a trend in US academia in quasi-popular books to
> adopt one-to-one literal translations from Tibetan etc -- a form
> of dumbing down ?

I know of only one person (Hopkins) who does this, and to my mind
the results are an odd combination of disaster and farce. The effect
is not to dumb a text down but to make the translation of even a
relatively straightforward text all but inaccessible to everyone
except the most learned and experienced philologists, or to people
who have been inititated into that particular cult of translators.

> Seems to me that Richard has presented at different times two
> varied statements on papanca--one as proliferation of thought,
> such as obsessing about things or what I'd call spinning endless
> and pointless movies in one's head, and the recent translation
> as wrong view in the face of good evidence against it.

The two ideas are very closely related. The Sanskrit word
"prapa~nca" simply means something like elaboration. As a techical
term is means the sort of elaboration of a theory that one does when
the theory is challenged (or put to a test by observations that
apparently throw the theory over). As far as I can tell, it is this
second meaning that is most often at work in Buddhist texts.

As a literal meaning of "prapanca", then, we have the sort of
proliferation of theories that one does to shore up a view to which
she has become attached. As a secondary meaning, it comes to connote
the obsessiveness of the person whose clinging to a theory makes her
come up with a proliferation of defenses of the theory that has been
challenged. But we're not finished yet. Because "prapanca" always,
in Buddhists texts, signifies bad thinking or dysfunctional thinking
of some kind, Buddhist polemicists loved to characterize certain
kinds of thinking as prapanca. For example, if someone is addicted
to some version of non-dualism then he may dismiss any dichotomy
with a wave of the hand and an utterance of the word "prapanca",
which is a bit like a Buddhist curse of anathema.

> I find it hard to conceive of stubbornly maintaining a view in
> the face of good contrary evidence, unless one is in deep
> psychological trouble.

Stubbornly maintaining pet views in the face of countervailing
evidence is one of the most common human reactions to countervailing
evidence. I cannot think of anyone I have ever known who does not do
it sometimes. It is a function of strong attachment to a particular
view or Weltanschauung.  Having said that, I would also agree that
prapanca does betoken deep psychological trouble. I think the
majority of human beings ARE in deep psychological trouble. My
evidence? Several thousand years of human history.

> I tried to track down the understanding of papañca as a
> sub-species of ayoniso manasikaara

This may prove to be a wild goose chase. I am the only person I know who
has expressed that understanding, so you may not find it stated quite so
brazenly in any other text.

> That would make papanca a sort of dogmatic rigidity of thought. Am I
> getting the gist of your definition?

Yes, exactly. Prapa~nca is often translated as "obsession". Lance Cousins
has reported that commentaries to the Pali canon often gloss papanca as a
kind of obsessive clinging to a point of view. This is the psychological
feature of someone who does the sort of "intellectual damage control" that
I was discussing. One begins with a view (d.r.s.ti). The view fails to hld
up in the light of experiences. One is unwilling to abaondon the view. So
one generates some prapanca (theoretical proliferation) to shore it up. It
is VERY common for words to mean both a thing and either the cause or th
effect of that thing. So prapanca (papanca) can signify both the
theoretical proliferation itself and its cause, the cause being the
obsession that makes one keep trying to defend one's view in the face of
counterevidence.

> Can you refer me to some texts where I might read more on this
> explication of the term?

I tried to spell out my thinking on how Naagaarjuna, and other early
Buddhists, used the term in my book entitled _Dignaga on the
interpretation of signs_. Good luck finding a copy of that book anywhere
outside a billionaire's personal library.

> I've also seen it presented as proliferation (of thought) and as
> thought directed by desire and viewpoint.

Yes, exactly. I see it as the sort of proliferation that one does when one
is strongly attached to a view. It makes sense to me that Naagaarjuna saw
the Buddha's agenda as one of destroying all views and the prapanca that
views generate when one is attached to them. I see this agenda articulated
most clearly in parts of the Sutta-nipaata of the Pali canon. That is why
I see Naagaarjuna as a very conservative thinker whose principal task was
to defend the aagamas (the Sanskrit and other Indic counterparts to the
Pali canon). He was deeply attracted to the Buddha's assault on views and
looked around him and saw Buddhists doing very little but generating views
and spinning out prapanca. (God knows WHAT he would do if he could see us
NOW!)

> While I do know that Vasubhandu spoke of real existing bases for
> reality, I wasn't aware that he went so far as to say that
> complex properties such as these 10 mental states really exist,
> while their possessors have no existence whatsoever. Does he
> also say that mental states such as these can know themselves?

I believe he does, although I cannot now find a passage to verify
this impression. (My copy of the Abhidharmakosha is in Montreal, and
I'm still in Albuquerque, a city in which good copies of the
Abhidharmakosha are as rare as friendly dogs.)

Dignaaga, who is traditionally regarded as a disciple of Vasubandhu,
and who wrote a commentary to the Abhidharmakosha, argued that every
cognitive event (or, in other words, every dharma of which awareness
of something is a feature) is aware of not only its object but also
of itself. It is, he argued, because each cognitive dharma is aware
of itself that the illusion arises that there is a knowing subject
that is different from the known object. Because we all know that at
every moment there is something that is aware of each act of
awareness, we falsely conclude that there is an enduring self that
witnesses transitory acts of awareness. But when we realize, through
a combination of experience and logic, that what is aware of each
act of awareness is each act of awareness being aware of itself, and
that each act of self-aware awareness must vanish in the very moment
it arises, we realize that what is aware of awareness must be
changing at every moment. And when we realize that, then the notion
of an enduring subject of awareness vanishes.

Dharmakiirti argues in much the same way but at much greater length.
This type of argumentation is also quite characteristic of
Vasubandhu; so even if he does not specifically make just this
argument, he does make arguments with this overall flavour.

> In typical synchronicity fashion just when I have rejoined the list after a
> six month hiatus the very subject I am having trouble with Refuge, is a
> topic of discussion on the list.

Welcome back, Steven. It's good to see your input here again.

> Lama Zopa says to take refuge in the Buddha is to literally
> believe that the historical Buddha truly attained Buddhahood.

In the Pali canon (which has always been my principal frame of
reference), it is said that going for refuge is something that one
can do sincerely only when one has become a stream entrant. Becoming
a stream entrant involves, among other things, the elimination of
doubt about four things: 1) doubt about the Buddha is doubting
whether any person has ever had the mental attributes of a buddha;
2) doubt about the Dharma is doubting that there is such a thing as
nirvana or the path to it; 3) doubt about the Sangha is doubting
that anyone has ever been a stream entrant, a once-returner, a never
returner or an arhant; and 4) doubt about the practice is
questioning the effectiveness of morality, concentration and wisdom
as factors in bringing an end to suffering.

Going for refuge to the Buddha usually means acknowledging that the
thirty-seven bodhipakshas have actually been attained by someone and
can be attained again by others, including oneself. So I suppose you
could say that having no doubt about whether there is something to
go to for refuge would be a precondition of going for refuge. (After
all, you can't really go for refuge to Kansas City if you think the
place doesn't really exist.)

> As to the Dharma I accept the Ch'an point of view that the
> sutras are not necessarily the ultimate truth but at best only
> pointers to the truth.

This is not only a Ch'an idea. No Buddhist goes for refuge to the
teachings. The Dharma refuge is to nirvana and to the supramundane
path by which one gets from the world of dukkha to the end of
dukkha. (This is why non-dualists can't effectively go for refuge.
They can't accept the radical and fundamental distinction between
dukkha and dukkha-nirodha.)

> Furthermore according to some "teachers" if one takes refuge in
> the Three Jewels one can no longer accept anybody else as a
> teacher

It is helpful to recall the Buddha's advice to the military general
who wished to go for refuge to the Buddha but still felt he should
honour his former teacher. The Buddha told him that he must continue
to pay homage to his previous teacher. Anyone who expects refuge to
the Buddha to require going exclusively to the Buddha for refuge is
apparently unaware of what the Buddha himself taught.

> or if one takes refuge then to break that refuge is a strong
> karmic evil. For myself I can accept neither of these two
> propositions.

In this you are on very secure ground. Going for refuge does not
require checking your brain in at the reception desk.

> Although I call myself a Buddhist I still learn much from other
> non-dualist traditions such as Hindu Vedanta Kashmir Shaivism
> and Taoist thought.

I should hope you also still learn much from other dualist and
pluralist traditions as well. It would be unfortunate to make a
false dichotomy between dualist and non-dualist traditions and to
exclude one in favour of the other.

> As to the Sangha while I admire people that are renunciates I
> can not accept the idea that they are a quasi-priesthood and are
> intermediaries between people and reality.

Fortunately, going for refuge to the Sangha has nothing at all to do
with going for refuge to the bhikkhu-sangha, or even to the Buddhist
community as a whole. It has to do with going for refuge to all
people, regardless whether they are monastic or lay, who have broken
through the delusion of believing in a fixed and enduring self, who
no longer approach rituals and vows only for personal gain and who
are deeply cynical about the possibility of improving one's
character through practice.

> For instance the idea that refuge can only be taken in front of
> an ordained monks, as some monks say, is unacceptable to me.

It was also unacceptable to the Buddha and to most of the Buddhist
scholastic traditions I have studied. It is always sufficient to
conjure up a mental image of the Buddha and to go for refuge to that
mental image. No witnesses are necessary at all.

> As to the Sangha being the preservers of the tradition certainly
> I have gotten more from the Western Academics who have
> translated the Buddhist texts then to the community of monks.

One hopes you have also benefitted from your Uncle Dave. (I am
assuming that everyone has a very wise and kind-hearted uncle who
has served as a mentor and a true Dharma friend, even though he
would not go near any church or temple with a barge pole.)

> The Three Jewels within our own nature are intrinsically
> possessed by each sentient being, and are not to be sought
> externally; that is, one's own spiritual illumination and
> enlightenment constitute the Precious Buddha; the absolute,
> permanent, complete, and pure truths constitute the Precious
> Dharma; and one's own nature and harmony are the Precious
> Sangha.

When I was a Zen practitioner, we were taught to do four
prostrations. The first three were to the external Buddha, Dharma
and Sangha, and the fourth was to the three jewels within oneself.
The fourth prostration was often called a "half prostration" in
recognition of the probability that the three jewels within oneself
are not quite mature yet.

>   In that light can I call myself a Buddhist.

You're the only one with the authority to call you a Buddhist. No
one else has that authority at all. I can think of nothing more
un-Buddhist that questioning the sincerity of another person's going
for refuge. I hope no one has been so rude as to question your being
a Buddhist.

> It seems to me, from what little I've read, that one needn't be
> cynical about improving one's character (reducing one's
> suffering, increasing one's empathy and insight, etc.) through
> particular practices--meditative, intellectual, and otherwise.

You're quite right. I wrote precisely the opposite of what I was
thinking. My sentence structure got away from me, I guess. (Danger!
Danger! Run-away sentence!)

What I meant to say, of course, was that one is a stream entrant only when
one has *abandoned* cynicism (vicikitsaa) about practice, just as one has
abandoned the view of the self as a fixed and permanent structure and one
has abandoned following s'iila and vrata only for one's own personal gain.

Thanks for drawing my inept wording to my attention so that the error
could be corrected.

> I am trying to track down the sources of what the Buddha said was
> "imponderables", i.e. questions to which he won't answer because it goes
> beyond one's ability to comprehend.

I have never heard of any such questions, but you may be thinking of
the fourteen questions that were not answered (avyaak.rta), because
answering the questions would not have any bearing on attaining
nirvana.

> Does anybody know the exact complete list and what they are?

The 14 unexplained issues are:

Is the world eternal?
Is the world not eternal?
Does the world have boundaries?
Does the world have no boundaries?
Is life the same as the physical body?
Is life one thing and the physical body another?
Does a truth-knower exist after death?
Does a truth-knower cease to exist at death?
Does a truth knower in some sense exist and in another sense not
exist after death?
Does a truth-knower neither exist nor not exist after death?
Is discontent caused by oneself?
Is discontent caused b others?
Is discontent caused partially by oneself and partially by others?
Is discontent caused neither by oneself nor by others?

In the Po.t.thapada Sutta of the Diigha-nikaaya (DN 9.28), the
Buddha is represented as giving the following explanation for why he
did not offer an explanation on each point: "Because it is not
connected to a purpose, nor is it connected to virtue, nor does it
lead to humility, nor to dispassion, nor to cessation, nor to
tranquility, nor to superior understanding, nor to supreme
awakening, nor to nirvana. Therefore I have not explained."

> The difficulty there seems to be in determining whether A.
> Einstein said something - or whether the quote attributed to him
> has been changed - is, I think a good illustration of how foolish
> claims that the historical Buddha spoke particular words more than
> 2,500 years ago probably are.

And such claims are arguably as irrelevant as they are foolish.

One of my colleagues today told me that during the Renaissance,
scholars made a distinction between aureate and stencil
translations. An aureate translation strives to capture the meaning
of a text, while a stencil translation strives to give a
word-by-word rendering. Another of my colleagues pointed out that
Hinduism and Buddhism have both been far more inclined toward the
aureate. The meanings of teachings are transmitted, but the actual
wording is considered relatively immaterial. While I would wish to
point out the extraordinary measures that reciters of the Vedas take
to ensure that the mantras remain intact, I think my second
colleague's observation is basically correct. What words the Buddha
actually spoke has not mattered much to most Buddhists in the past.

It is interesting to note that the preoccupation with finding the
actual words spoken by the Buddha is largely an obsession of Western
converts, as is the tendency to impose literal interpretations on
the words imagined to be the Buddha's.

> The war seems inevitable and further wars seem likely to follow.
> Is this the price we pay for the freedom to practice in the way we
> choose? I'm a little surprised that there hasn't been more
> discussion about the situation here on Buddha-L - are we too
> jaded?

I don't think so. Speaking for myself, I have received so many
complaints from BUDDHA-L subscribers about getting "off-topic"
whenever I get on my anti-war pony that I have decided not to say
much more about the issue here. I now write all my anti-war messages
to president@whitehouse.gov. (I always get an immediate reply
assuring me that President Bush values hearing from me and will
attend to my message as soon as he learns to read.)

Frankly, I cannot understand how opposing a dangerous, unpredictable
and unnecessary war being proposed by a handful of political leaders
whose judgement has been completely vitiated by greed, hatred and
delusion is "off-topic" on a list dedicated to a set of theories and
practices aimed at helping people reduce avoidable forms of dukkha.
Indeed, I can't quite imagine how anyone who admires the idea of
bodhicitta could be thinking about much of anything else than the
current threat of war these days. But I cannot dictate what other
people choose to think about.

> But you are correct, time is running out.

Time is running out only because small-minded people are growing impatient and
refusing to grant more time. It is, in other words, disingenuous for Bush and
the various other Horsemen of the Apocalypse to go around saying "Time is
running out." What would be more honest for them to say is something like "We
have unilaterally decided not to all any more time to pass before we initiate
a completely unprovoked and unwarranted invasion of a sovereign nation."

> Also, an ongoing moral question that so far has eluded me is how
> can you protect others from physical harm (such as what happened
> on 9/11). Without resorting to some form of violence.

A good place to start might be to remove US military bases from
foreign countries, where many citizens cannot seem to help feeling
as though they have been occupied by a foreign (and even a
potentially hostile) state. There is really no excuse for US
military personnel and equipment to be placed anywhere but on US
soil. They could be used, if necessary, to defend the US if it were
attacked by Canada or Mexico. But troops not being used purely for
defense can only be seen as offensive.

Today I saw on the CBC news (which I get e-mailed to me a few times
a day as a result of punching the right buttons on home page of
cbc.ca) that the US administration is promising to spend billions of
dollars to help restore a post-war Iraq. Now it seems to me that an
alternative plan might be to spend billions of dollars buying
weapons from Iraq and then destroying them before they hurt
somebody. Perhaps the countries that sold those weapons to Iraq in
the first place (countries such as the US and Germany, inter alia)
could just buy them back. The money could be used to help restore an
Iraq devastated by embargoes. It would create much more good will
among Iraqis (and other Muslims and Christians, not to mention
Buddhist and Hindus, all over the world) than bombing them and THEN
restoring them. Creating good will of that sort would do far more to
prevent future wars and acts of violence. One kills animosity in
others by acts of love, not by taking the lives of those who harbour
animosity. Oddly enough, this is also how one kills animosity in
oneself.

> As a Buddhist, I can see how further acts of violence will keep
> the cycle of violence in motion; violence is inimical to ahimsa.
> But also, as a Buddhist, I can't advocate standing by and doing
> nothing when Osama Bin Laden and other fanatics have clearly
> indicated that they will be more than happy to use dirty bombs and
> biological weapons on US soil (and, presumably, anywhere else they
> see fit).  Offering protection is part of dana paramita, at least
> in the forms of Mahayana Buddhism I have studied. And so, for now,
> I remain sitting on the fence of ambivalence.

Time to get off the fence, Bill. Osama bin Laden hates the US for no
other reason than that it has huge amounts of military hardware, and
the men to use it, parked in Saudi Arabia. If we can understand how
it would feel to have Saudi military bases in our spiritual centre
(Las Vegas), we can perhaps understand how it feels to a Muslim to
have American troops not so far from Mecca. By being decent human
beings and helping people rather than threatening them, our
government could prevent all future attacks very easily. Without
violence. Let others live in dignity, and they will not want to kill
you. I promise you that.

> I am also more than happy to give up my own personal freedoms if it
> makes someone else safe.

Are you willing to give up your personal freedoms if it does not
make others safe, and if taking your freedoms from you and seeing
you meekly accept it only emboldens your government to take away the
freedoms of others? I think one really needs to think about this
possible consequence of our willingly giving up a few personal
freedoms, rather than uncritically buying the government's position
that they are just trying to protect us and are doing all these
wonderful things for our own good. Before buying into the
government's rhetoric, ask to see some evidence that their strategy
is actually working.

> Also, I wonder if someone could kindly point me to the
> guidelines for transliterating Sanskrit for use on BUDDHA-L?

long vowels are doubled (which is phonetically correct): raaja

retroflexes and anusvara have dots before them: pi.n.d.a.m

palatal n has the tilde before: pa~nca

palatal s and guttural n have double marks before: "siilaa"nga

These conventions are exactly the ones used for encoding Indic
languages for the Velthuis and the Wikner fonts and macros for
typesetting in TeX and LaTeX2e.

Eventually most of us will probably have access to Unicode and will
be able to use that, but for now if you use the Unicode for
Sanskrit, it will produce gibberish for many readers (or at least a
different sort of gibberish than such renderings as naagaarjunaaya
nama.h).

>> Kalupahana in his work on Buddhist Psychology draws attention to the fact
>> that the Buddha stated  in Ariyaparriyesana sutra that Nirodhaasammapati is
>> to be experienced via the body rather than through wisdom ('kayena
>> sacchikaraniya dhamma').
>> Nagaboshi
>
>    Excuse me this maybe naive question, but what exactly does this
> statement mean and what are its consequences, please? Are there any
> commentaries to this passage?

In the Anguttara-nikaaya 3.3.21 the Buddha is portrayed as saying there are
three kinds of people. One kind testifies to truth with the body, one kind
wins right view and the third has faith. The Buddha is asked which of this
kinds is superior. The Buddha responds that each method can lead one to
being an arhat. Every individual should use the method that works best for
him- or herself. That answer, I think, pretty well shuts down anyone who
boldly claims that one MUST do some specified kind of practice in order to
make progress on the path.

As for witnessing truth with the body, what the commentator says is that
this refers to the non-conceptual jhaanas in which the body feels a very
strong experience of peace.  Cultivating deep jhaana is one of the three
ways; thinking about things and doing philosophical investigations is
another way; having faith and living a life of service is another way. Each
works. Choose what works for you, and leave everyone else alone to chose
what works best for them.

> But your assumption that samadhi is out of range in martial arts
> practice raises an interesting question, and I wonder if anyone
> can answer it, from a doctrinal point of view.

The usual definition of samaadhi is kus'alacittasya ekagrataa
(single-pointedness of healthy thought). So if one is deeply
concentrating while robbing a bank, driving a racing car, or
dropping bombs on military targets, that concentration is not
samaadhi, for one cannot have a healthy mind while taking what is
not given, competing with others or causing deliberate harm to
others.

A healthy concentrated mind may be engaged either in either
conceptual or non-conceptual enterprises. The senses can be either
taking in information or withdrawn. And one can attain all the
fruits of the path if one cultivates any form of samaadhi (sensual
or non-sensual, conceptual or non-conceptual).

> Thanks for the clear answer regarding the engagement of the
> senses. I wonder about the definition of "healthy."

There are standard lists of mental qualities that constitute a
healthy mind. One such list, found in the Abhidharmakosha, has
these items: faith, courage, equanimity, humility, conscience,
absence of greed, absence of wish to harm, mental and emotional
flexibility and lack of confusion.

> If it means not clouded by gross negative emotions as in
> pramana/valid perception then I wonder about your categorical
> exclusion of competitors.

Competition is a desire to win, which entails a willingness to
inflict on others the pain of losing. It is hard to see where one
could find a home for competitiveness in a healthy mind according to
the defintion of health found in the Buddhist texts of which I am
aware.

> Specifically, are Buddhist debaters who are relentlessly on the
> prowl for errors in logic or knowledge or expression necessarily
> in a different class than other competitors?

I have very little experience with Buddhist debaters. I am not at
all interested in debate and never have been. So I can speak only
generally on the basis of what little I know from reading the texts
I have read, reflecting on them and trying to live by them. What I
would be inclined to say is that if a person is on the prowl for
errors and unwarranted assumptions in her own thinking, then she has
a healthy mentality. If one's only use of logic and knowledge is to
demonstrate one's own prowess and show others to be somehow of less
attainment, then of course it is competitive and (by most Buddhist
standards) sick.

> Richard, a question -- does this definition of samaadhi apply to
> those who practice attaining deep states of concentration in order
> to attain power, which they can then use for negative purposes?

As I understand it, if one's intention to is use any kind of power
to harm oneself or others, then it is not an example of healthy
thinking and therefore is not samyak-samaadhi. Where some confusion
arises is that Buddhists also speak of generic samaadhi, which is
just mental focus, which is considered a necessary feature in every
thought or experience of every kind. So samaadhi, like cholesterol,
can be either good or bad. Good samaadhi is the kind most often
recommended by Buddhists.

> I am thinking of Hindu (and Buddhist) stories of demons or men
> whose yogic practice brings them divine power -- or would they not
> be considered to have attained samaadhi?

My favourite story in this genre is in Jaina literature. There we
find an elaborate story of one of the Ajivikas making a huge effort
to cultivate samaadhi so that he can have the charisma necessary to
seduce women, bamboozle people out of their money and get people to
do whatever he wants them to do. He begins to hang around with
Mahaaviira and becomes an adept meditator and cultivates enormous
powers. But he knows he is evil, and this gnaws away at him. So he
does what any reasonable evil person would do: he sets out to
destroy the model of good in his life that makes him aware of his
own evil. He strives to kill Mahaaviira by blasting him with his
psychic heat. But Mahaaviira simply remains perfectly calm, and his
equanimity serves as a shield against the psychic heat. The psychic
heat cannot reach him. But once unleashed it has to go somewhere, so
it is deflected back at its source of origin, who is promptly burned
to a crisp. See? No matter how much hate you generate, you can't
harm a lover.

> I am asking because I have always thought that concentration
> exercises could be pursued for the purpose of gaining power, and
> not necessarily for the purpose of liberation or awakening.

I suspect most people these days cultivate concentration for
purposes other than attaining liberation or awakening. Whenever
yogis appears on the cover of Time magazine (as they have twice in
the past 18 months) you know that yoga has been pretty well
completely hijacked by people who see it as part of what they need
to do to attain their goals of becoming younger, more beautiful,
healthy, rich and immortal. There's a lot of money to be made in
selling people impossible dreams, so yoga (and, I note with
considerable sadness, Buddhism) has increasingly become one of the
many strategies used by hucksters to sell people their own
delusionary dreams. If this keeps up I might become a touch cynical.

--- begin forwarded text

"Why of course the people don't want war. That is understood.
But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine
the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people
along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a
parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the
people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That
is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked,
and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing
the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

-Hermann Goering, Nazi officer,
during his Nuremberg war crimes trial

A few subscribers have expressed some degree of being puzzled by my
claim that Buddhism should not be considered superior to any other
religion. It is very difficult for me to imagine how anyone could take
exception to that claim, and it is equally difficult for me to see why
the normally sensible and perceptive Alex Wilding would see this as a
relativistic position that would lead to a lack of enthusiasm for
anything in life! I can only assume I must have stated my claim with
such awkwardness and carelessness that perceptive and discerning minds
were confused by it. Let me therefore try again.

The only enterprise in life for which I still have a sense of urgency is
that of producing an uninterrupted flow of positive mental states. The
states that I regard as positive are such things as love, intellectual
and emotional  flexibility and good will toward all living things. I
have been blessed with a lifetime of fairly consistent compansionship
with people who share my enthusiasm for such positive mental states (and
for the actions that naturally flow out of them). What I have observed
is that these people represent every major religion in the world, bar
none, and a good many non-religious enterprises (such as science,
Marxism, and materialism). I have also observed that there are some
people who seem not to develop much skill at cultivating positive mental
states no matter which religion or philosophical system they adopt.

From this pair of observations I am inclined to the working hypothesis
that the cultivation of positive mental states is a highly individual
matter, one that depends very much on the person and relatively little
on institutions, practices and beliefs. To put it another way, a person
inclined to virtue will be able to cultivate it no matter what religion
he or she follows. (One of the most genuinely kindly and insightful
people I met during my youth was a German Quaker yogi who had been a
Nazi during his youth and still felt that National Socialism had had a
potential to be a benevolent force, until it was hijacked by a few
tragically deluded individuals who saw military action and death camps
as a workable strategy for bringing peace and justice to the world. So
in this person's case, even being a Nazi, which is not a religion I
would normally commend, had not impeded his cultivation of virtues that
I found admirable and inspiring.)

It is difficult for me to think of tragic delusion these days without
thinking of George W. Bush, John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld. All of
these men are, I am convinced, profoundly religious and dedicated to
doing what they see as good works. I have no doubts that their motives
are quite good. They are, however, mistaken in thinking that the
strategies they have been pursuing will bring the results they expect.
Like all deluded people, they will provide the conditions for quite a
large amount of suffering. But their delusions cannot be generalized to
others who share their religious beliefs. They happen to be conservative
evangelical Christians. It would, however, be a serious mistake to
assume that other conservative evangelical Christians generally support
them. Some do, but a good many do not. Bush and company are generally
virtuous men and women, I think, and I think they have become virtuous
at least in part by sincerely following their religious convictions.

So it would be folly to find fault with their religious beliefs and
practices. It would be silly to depict Christianity as a whole, or any
particular form of it (such as Fundamentalism, Pentecostalism or
Evangelism) as systematically wrong-headed or wrong-hearted. Similarly,
it would only be blind arrogance and smugness to depict Buddhism as on
the whole superior to Christianity or any form thereof. I am fairly
confident that George W. Bush and his advisors would still be the most
dangerous human beings on earth even if they were Vipassana
practitioners, Vajrayanists or Soka Gakkaijin. No religion on earth is
incapable of delivering people from negativity and folly. No religion on
earth can deliver everyone from negativity and folly.

I trust this has set at ease the minds of Alex, Mary and Bill and that
my working hypothesis will not strike any of them as too emasculated,
relativistic or politically correct.

>>> Question: What makes a humanist different from a buddhist? And v.v., of
>>> course.
>>
>> Hal wrote:
>> A Humanist wakes up every day and thinks about what they are. A
>> Buddhist wakes up every day and knows they are a Buddhist. A buddhist is
>> less prone to be a slave to thoughts.
>
> A Humanist knows they are not a Christian but other than that, they will
> just latch onto anything that comes their way.

If Hal is a Buddhist, then I would have to add that a Humanist is capable
of thinking clearly and independently, whereas a Buddhist tosses out
fatuous self-serving platitudes.

As for Stefan's original question, how does Buddhism differ from Humanism,
I would have to say the answer to this is precisely the same as "How does a
sardine differ from a fish?"

>I still want to know what's so ignorant about affirming life. It seems
>like a misreading to me.

In classical Buddhism, one of the principal definitions of nirvana is bhava-
nirodha, the cessation (nirodha) of clinging to life (bhava). It is said
that bhava is the cause of all rebirth. One is reborn because one wishes to
continue existing. Why? Because one is ignorant. It is ignorance that makes
one affirm life to such an extent that one wishes to continue existing; it
is also ignorance that makes one wish to change from one's present form of
existence to a different (presumably better) one. An arhant, one who has
eradicated this affirmation of life, is often described as one who neither
wishes to live nor wishes to die, but calmly accepts whatever may come as a
worker awaits his wages. The arhant, in other words, is neither life-
affirming nor life-denying. If one were life-affirming, then one would be
ignorant and therefore not an arhant. So it's not a misreading, Miriam;
it's just a Buddhist doctrine that apprently does not appeal to you.

>Sorry, I wasn't clear. The cliche that I was referring to is "all is one."
>...in recent years it seems to have become a tenet of the Western Buddhist
>canon. I am curious how this came about.

Through ignorance, I suspect. I think this "all is one" sentiment is found
only in the Southern Californian canon of Western Buddhism. The "all is
one" view is most thoroughly repudiated by every Asian Buddhist school I
have ever stumbled across, nor have I seen it surface very often in Western
Buddhism. It is so foreign to all the sources that have informed my
thinking of Buddhism that I heard the hot-dog joke at least twenty-five
times before I understood what was supposed to be funny about it. Someone
(right here on BUDDHA-L) finally explained it to me, and I STILL didn't get
it, because I have never heard of a Buddhist even thinking, let alone
saying, such thoughts as "Make me one with everything." Come to think of
it, I can't imagine a Buddhist ordering a hot dog.

>Well--the Canadian health service might want to reform itself so far as
>effectiveness goes.

Actually, there is no such thing as a Canadian health service. Each
province has its own system. Some provinces are more socialized than
others. Some provinces, such as Quebec, are facing severe shortages of
doctors, nurses and hospitals. I suppose it's a toss-up whether you prefer
a health-care system in which you can get care for free after a wait or one
in which you can get it immediately at a cost that bankrupts you. Given a
choice between dying from an overly long wait and dying because you can't
afford treatment and don't wish for your descendants to be burdened with
massive debt, I am not sure which a rational person would choose. The
choice transcends the bounds of Buddhist logic, I'm afraid. The Buddhist
option, I suspect, would be simply to accept death gracefully and to
harbour no resentment against the local government.

>I've heard that many Canadians end up coming to nearby cities in the US
>for urgent treatment.

I also know that many Americans end up coming to Canada for affordable
treatment. I have also personally known Americans who came to Canada to get
advanced treatments that simply were not yet available in American at all.

Several years ago I had surgery in Canada and had been planning to be in
the USA when it was time to remove the surgical staples. I told my Canadian
surgeon that I would just have the staples taken out in the USA. My surgeon
warned me that another patient of his had done just that and had then
received a bill from the USAmerican doctor for over $1000. That may just
have been a Canadian urban legend, for there is nothing more that a
Canadian loves to do than to tell horror stories about travel in the USA.
Urban legend or not, it scared me enough to make me cancel my trip to the USA.

>Perhaps we will hear about this from some of our Scandinavian members?

Perhaps we'll hear something from some of them about Buddhism, which is,
after all, supposed to be the business of this list.

> To those that are not born here, you really don't have the right
> to be saying too much about us.

I am not sure what you are talking about exactly. Are you suggesting
that I have no right to speak about the United States of America to
people who were not born there? Is it your view that Americans
should talk about themselves only among themselves, in the way that
parents talk about adult stuff only when the children have gone to
bed, or the way that children talk about kid stuff only when adults
have left the room? I can't sort out what you are saying at all. Let
me, however, offer a few responses.

First of all, I don't think it makes any difference where one was
born. It has been my experience that most people are very young when
they are born, and the place where this event takes place has much
less influence on them than what they experience subsequently. A
person's observations about human behaviour, for example, are no
less accurate if she was born in Albania than if she was born in
Tierra del Fuego.

As it happens, I was born in the United States of America, and it
was there that I was indoctrinated in a process that was referred
to, with tragic inaccuracy, as public education. Education, as you
know, comes from the Latin verb meaning to lead out. The education I
received in the United States of America led me out of the country
in search of sanity, something that I have always found in
particularly short supply in that land of cultural occlusion. Having
gathered a reasonably good supply of weapons, I now plan to return
to my native land and to go to war with the various forms of greed,
hatred and delusion that drive the hideous monster that seems intent
on swallowing the earth. (I plan to begin by returning my native
place, New Mexico, to the country to which it was assigned by God at
the time of creation, namely, the United States of Mexico. Heck,
most Americans I have met outside New Mexico don't even know it has
been part of the United States of America since 1912. But I
digress.)

> I am not a young person and I have been forunate to live and
> travel all over this world and I, too, have been spitted on,
> stoned and many more things just because I am an American and
> rudness I have found everywhere.

I used to get stoned when I was younger, but I now prefer just to
watch the sun rise and set and listen to the birds sing and the
coyotes howl. As for being spat upon or treated rudely, it has
happened to me only a few times, most of them in America while
indulging in the inalienable rights of free speech and free
assembly. Only once have I been pelted with stones and called ugly
names outside of the USA. That was in Canada, of all places, in
1969. My assailants were a gang of twelve-year-old kids playing
street hockey, and they took offense at my long hair and beard.
These puck-shooting savages seemed totally innocent of my New
Mexican provenience. All I could do was cry out pitifully: "Where is
the CIA when I really need them? Where are the Marines? I am an
American citizen being brutally attacked by hostile Canadian
adolescents, and my President is not yet bombing Ottawa!" It was a
dark day indeed. But that was thirty-three years ago, and some of
the bitterness has faded.

> We are only 270 million people out of the world's population oif
> 6.3 billion yet don't think that we are all stupid and not aware
> of what is taking place in this world.

Of course, you're right. I'd guess that no more than 268 million
Americans are unaware of what is going in in the rest of the world.
Most of them, incidentally, are also unaware of what is going on
outside their own shopping mall.

> Regardless, we are all one in this global family

No, thank God, we are not all one. A family is made up of
individuals, each of whom is different. A family can function well
only when the individuals in it fully understand, accept and learn
to live creatively with all their many differences. This is where
America has really failed, and where it keeps on failing. You see,
Susan, Americans (I am here speaking only of the 98% who give the
other 2% a bad name) have never learned that other people in other
places really are different and would very much like to remain as
they are. Americans do not realize that not everyone wants to eat
buckets of grease and salt at Kentucky Fried Chicken and
MacDonald's. Not everyone wants to drink sixteen teaspoons of
refined sugar in an American soda pop. Not everyone wants to shop in
Walmarts and work for low-paying subsidiaries of downsized
American corporations. Not everyone wants to watch reruns of Dallas
and Dynasty at home and to go to the cinema to watch plotless films
produced by megalomaniacs with scripts written by cocaine addicts
and acted out by fluffy-brained self-absorbed bipolar anorexics. Not
everyone wants to go to church on Sundays to worship the American
flag and the American dollar. Not everyone wants to have their
Weltanshauung dictated to them by the folks on CNN as they giggle
and smirk their way through the day's top stories (ALWAYS about
America or places where Americans are dying and killing) and where
the flow of inane "news reporting" is relieved only by "in-depth
discussions" in which two or more grinning imbeciles with different
but equally untenable and ill-informed views shout predictable
slogans at each other, and where "everybody's talkin' and nobody's
listenin'."

> and as a Buddhist and as an American, I wish all of you the
> blessings of all the Buddhas and from all of our mothers and
> fathers of our ancestorial beings that our world settles down
> here. Peace and love to all.

You have apparently not heard that American is the land of no
buddha. Buddhas will not bless America until Americans stop buying,
bullying and bombing and in general stop rushing around like crazed
ants when a dog has piddled on their hill. Buddhas will not bless
America until Americans sit down and listen to the wind whistling
through their nostrils and feel the joy rise in their hearts when
they see a mother bird feeding some newly hatched young and feel the
sadness in their hearts when they see how very fragile life around
them is and how very difficult it is to find deep contentment, even
for a few moments. When 268 million Americans turn off their
televisions, flush their Coca Colas down the toilet and learn to
enjoy drinking water out of a river, when they park their cars and
rediscover their feet, and when they begin to reflect on the
consequences for themselves and others of their choices of
pleasures, then the Buddhas will offer a few blessings. But don't
hold your breath, Sister Susan. Don't hold your breath.

> I suppose they could be encouraged to see what the truth in
> Rahula's comments is for them (the rose among the thorns), or what
> they find just absolutely must be changed in order for the rest to
> be palatable to them at all.

Yes, this would be quite a good approach. Something that struck me
about Rahula's statement is that it is NOT anti-Christian as such,
but rather is exposing a particular mentality as childish---a
mentality that one can find in every religion, and a mentality that
one can also find decried in every religion. Most of my Christian
and Muslim friends would agree with Rahula that the particular views
he describes are 1) less mature than others and 2) actually held by
some people. Part of what any kind of education is about is bringing
people to more refined versions of themselves, and it is rarely the
case that one can become more refined without first recognizing that
there are ways in which one is now relatively crude. And it is a
rare ego that accepts its own crudeness without some degree of pain
and embarrassment, perhaps even defensiveness.  But such discomforts
tend to pass, and in the end one is grateful for having had them,
and for having had the opportunity for passing beyond them.

Arvind Sharma last night told me a story, which he thought was
Tibetan, about some dogs who saw the human beings in their village
and began to envy them. "The human beings live so much longer than
we dogs. The human beings have very dextrous hands, and they can do
so many things we can't do. The human beings live in comfortable
houses and eat excellent food, and we get such luxuries only when
the human beings think of giving them to us." And so on. Then one of
the dogs said "Rather than worshiping the human beings or being
envious of them, let us strive to become human beings ourselves.
Let's work to improve ourselves." The dogs all perked up their ears.
"What an excellent idea! Yes, that is exactly what we should do." So
they began to ask what they would have to do to become human beings.
And the wise old dog among them said "Eventually, we shall have to
give up our dog natures." As soon as he said that, all the other
dogs howled with indignation and angrily chased the old dog from
their midst. And that is why we still have dogs amongst us, and why
WE are still human beings rather than gods.

In an essay entitled 'Religion of today', Swami Vivekananda wrote
"Temples or churches, books or forms, are simply the kindergarten of
religion, to make the spiritual child strong enough to take higher
steps, and these first steps are necessary if he wants religion."

I would be inclined to see Rahula's observations as being very much
along the same line. To speak of people as childish who protect
themselves against the things they fear by inventing imagined gods,
rather than by facing themselves, is to say something about them
that could help them become more refined and mature and fulfilled
than they now are. It is no more anti-Christian than it would be
anti-Buddhist to say that doing the four foundations of mindfulness
meditation is more mature than relying on getting merit by putting
food in a monk's begging bowl once a week. It is no more
anti-Christian than it would be anti-American to say that bombing
other countries and forcing regime change on them is less mature
than, say, fully endorsing the Kyoto accords, working with UNESCO
and WHO to help eradicate ignorance and maldistributions of
resources and using one's nations resources to provide an adequate
health-care system rather than using them to design nuclear bunker
busters.

>Make sure he knows the difference btw Buddhism. and Hinduism.

The more I learn about both, the less confident I feel that I know the
difference between them, and the less important it seems to me to try to
distinguish them.

>Nice to be sanctioned by the imprimatur of science.  Does anyone else
>find it ironic that emotional states are no longer self-validating?

I can't find anything in the least ironic in that claim, nor do I find
anything particularly strange in the suggestion that people are sometimes
wrong in assessing their feelings. There are such things as denial and
dissociation. I would say that the largest single defect in classical
Buddhist psychology is the failure to recognize anything corresponding to
the notion of the unconscious, that is, psychological drives that are fully
operative without the full knowledge or understanding of the person being
driven by them.

>"You feel happy?  Well, that's enough:  you might not *be* happy.

Even classical Buddhism says just that. The so-called inverted views
consist in falsely thinking that something is a source of happiness when it
is in fact a source of discontent. In fact, despite the lack of a notion of
unconscious drives, Buddhist psychology repeatedly extends an invitation to
be less naive about one's self-assessments.

> In fact, there is no concept 'religion', as we generally think of
> it now, in Indo-European, nor in ancient India.

Arvind Sharma tells the story of when he was a student at Harvard,
he caught up to Wilfrid Cantwell Smith after a stimulating lecture
by that most excellent of men and asked him the difference between
religion and philosophy. Smith reportedly looked at Sharma and said
"You're an Indian, are you not?  For you, there is no difference at
all. They both come from the same source and cannot be
distinguished.  For a European, on the other hand, religion is what
comes from Jerusalem, philosophy is what comes from Greece."

> But dvesa seems to be thought of as working in the full light of
> our consciousness, albeit in the blindness of ignorance, and to be
> directed externally, and not reflexively upon the phenomena of
> mind itself.

I think avidyaa also works in the full light of consciousness.
Avidyaa is not obliviousness or the absence of understanding, but
rather the presence of misperceptions and false understandings of
how things really are. Avidyaa is not like not knowing where the
heck Jal, New Mexico is (it's down there by Hobbs); rather, avidyaa
is more like thinking that Albuquerque must be in Arizona, since
Albuquerque is in the USA but New Mexico is in Mexico. (Canadian
translation: Avidyaa is not like knowing where the heck Rawdon,
Quebec is;  rather, avidyaa is more like thinking that McGill
University must be in Toronto, since it is an English school and
Quebec is a French nation.)

> Interesting to watch people squirm when confronted with someone
> that says: "yes it's all true, the way to enlightenment, as
> decribed in the old traditions really works, and I've made it". Is
> it that we only believe stories like these when they are firmly in
> the past, or is it that we simply don't believe them at all I
> wonder.

I simply don't believe them at all. I agree with the man who stood
in the cornfield and said "There are no enlightened people. There
are only enlightened moments. And all of us have them from time to
time."

> I operate at a very low level of practice and maybe I'm just
> resentful of those who have higher realisations and can engage
> with such practices.

Moi aussi. For me a great day of practice is making it to 10:00am
without cussing out loud. (Imprecations muttered into my beard don't
count.)

All of this talk of advanced realizations and higher consciousness
strikes me as just so much horseshit. ..... Oh ding dangit, I
already cussed, and it's only shortly after 7:00am. I can see this
is going to be another bad practice day.

> If so, why does he believe that, rather than simply putting the
> matter off as "just not known one way or the other at present"?

Let me not try to speak for Jack Kornfield. Let me, rather, speak
for myself. My belief at present is that many of the impulses that
the Buddhist tradition has called afflictions (kilesas) are
"hard-wired" into the physical body and that one can therefore never
eliminate them entirely. At best (and for me this would be good
enough), one can manage them most of the time, perhaps even (if very
rarely met circumstances permit) all the time. This view,
incidentally, was held by various schools of Indian philosophy, most
notably the Nyaaya school, who argued that moksha can be attained
only at the moment when the physical body is no longer in the
picture.

Of course this whole issue, no matter which side one takes, is
impossible to prove conclusively. There is no compelling argument on
either side of the controversy over whether liberation from the
afflictions (kilesa-nirodha, aka nirvana) is possible during the
physical life of the body. So you may ask what my hunch, that the
answer that there is no liberation during life, is based upon. Well,
it is based on one observation and one purely practical
consideration.

The observation is that it is very common for people, even people
who have dedicated their entire lives to serious dharma practice, to
get into situations in which they cause themselves and others quite
a lot of unnecessary and avoidable pain. That it is so common for
people to fall, however temporarily, into self-delusion and various
kinds of unskilled actions, accompanied by transparently ridiculous
rationalizations, gives me confidence that afflictions are pretty
much impossible to eradicate fully, no matter how long they may lie
dormant. I am, of course, willing to be surprised on this, but to be
perfectly honest I am not sure how one could ever prove that
afflictions had been fully eradicated rather than that they were
lying dormant. So in the end I am inclined to regard this question
as unanswerable, since it is not at all clear what would count as
conclusive evidence for either position. In the absence of
conclusive evidence, one must choose a position on aesthetic or
pragmatic grounds.

The pragmatic consideration that appeals most to me is that striving
for unrealistic goals tends to increase rather than diminish pain
and unhappiness. If, then, the goal of nirvana during life is indeed
unrealistic, then one is likely to increase one's suffering as a
result of striving for it without much success. But decreasing
dukkha is the principal aim of my practice, so I don't much like to
chase after the impossible. I work on things closer to hand, such as
trying not to throw a bowling ball through the television set
whenever I see George W. Bush's leering mug poking its unwelcome
presence into my home. I see very little hope of making significant
progress on curbing my rage at that particular imbecile's forms of
greed, hatred and delusion, but at least I try. And that practice of
trying is enough to keep me busy during all my waking hours; I have
no need for such concepts as unsurpassed perfect awakening, for they
only get in the way.

So now I suppose someone will ask how someone who is not
particularly interested in Nirvana can go for refuge to the Dharma,
given that the Dharma to which one goes for refuge is, according to
classical Buddhist scholastics, nothing but Nirvana. Well, I think
of Nirvana as being somewhat like the north star. I'll probably
never get there, but when nights grow dark, it helps me find my way
around here where I live my daily life. So I am grateful to it. In
fact there is nothing for which I am more grateful than the Buddha's
teaching of Nirvana, even though I suspect it is false.

> This thread (not just Mr. Cowart's comment) tends, like so many
> others, to posit a binary expression of the topic: either you are
> enlightened all the time, or only temporarily.

Just out of curiosity, what might an alternative to these two
possibilities be? There are such things as false dichotomies, to be
sure. But I am not convinced this particular one is a false
dichotomy. It seems to me very much like a real dichotomy. (Did no
one ever tell you there are two kinds of duality: good duality and
bad?) One either has or has not permanently eradicated the
afflictions.

> Definitional argumentation really gets us nowhere.

I beg to differ. Stating definitions clearly enough enables us to
see what the questions of substance are. In this issue, I think the
question of substance is very clear. What is less clear is what the
answer to the question of substance is.

> If Nirvana is understood as the cessation of suffering, then I
> think there is a case to be made for realization occuring in the
> body as well as in mind.

Let me see if I understand you correctly. Are you suggesting that
when someone attains nirvana, which is usually defined as cessation
of the afflictions (kles'a-nirodha), that she no longer experiences
physical pain? This would be a little difficult to reconcile with
the standard Buddhist view that the kles'as are restricted to the
samskaara-skandha. This would suggest that eliminating them only
eliminates one's propensities to thoughts and intentions that are
harmful to self and others. The body, on the other hand, being
purely karma-resultant and not karma-generating, goes on having pain
until it takes its final breath. The Buddha himself, according to
most accounts, was in terrible physical pain during his last months
of life.

In short, I think we can safely conclude that the very idea of
enlightenment in the body is, from a traditional Buddhist
perspective, pure horse pucky and worthy only of being discarded (or
spread on the garden in hopes that it might nourish the growth of
more sweet-smelling products).

As for mind-body dualism, it would be difficult to find a more robust
tradition of mind-body dualism than we find in Dharmakiirti's works.
He goes to great pains to show that physical events have a casual
complex that is quite distinct from the causal complex of various
mental events. And is the naama-ruupa dichotomy, usually interpreted
as mental events and physical events (naama being vedanaa, samj~naa,
samskaara and vijn~aana, and ruupa being the physical body and its
attendant faculties) not as old as the theory of dependent
origination? The Buddha, it seems to me, was every bit as much a
mind-body dualist as our good friend Descartes. Indeed, the fact that
Descartes' first name was René (reborn), he must have been a Buddhist,
n´est-ce pas?

> I remember Richard pointing out that initially the Buddha forbade
> the reciting of mantras by Bhikkhus as being wrong livelihood - I
> seem to remember tracking down the passage in the Paali where he
> does.

To be more accurate, the Buddha forbade the reciting of mantras for
money (or other material gain).

> When did specifically Buddhist mantras appear?

As soon as Buddhists discovered that muttering matras was a quick
way to make money.

> In my mind this points to the ceiling of possible realization as
> long as we are embodied.

I quite agree. I think we both must be followers of the Nyaaya
school. They also denied the possibility of liberation while alive.
(Some of them even poked fun at Buddhists. I trust they rotted in
hell for doing so.)

> Whether or not we then go on to final liberation after bodily
> death is another question.

That's a question with a very easy answer for a physicalist. When
you die, you are liberated from all pain. Everybody who dies gains
nirvana. So while alive I guess what makes the most sense is to have
as much fun as possible.

> Tell me, Oh Keeper of the Authentic Tradition, what is Vipassana
> meditation in Theravada if not an intimate exploration of the
> relationship between negative states of mind and the body
> states?  What is the value of mindfulness of the body?

Since you ask, what the tradition says is that mental events do not
arise out of physical events and thus cannot be reduced to them, and
yet physical events have an influence on mental events and vice
versa. One can see the relationship as like that of a man and a
woman living together. The two are causally independent and hence
distinct, yet each can drive the other crazy. 

> Besides, mind/body dualism is empirically untenable.

Not at all. If it were that simple, philosophy of mind would not be
the biggest domain of inquiry in modern philosophy. All people would
have to do is look and see the truth. The question is very much
open, I'm afraid, and probably completely undecidable. On this
question everyone who has any view at all is, to some extent at
least, being dogmatic.

>> As for mind-body dualism, it would be difficult to find a more robust
>> tradition of mind-body dualism than we find in Dharmakiirti's works.
>
> That's a rather curious position, given his mereological refutation of
> external particles in the Pramanavartika.

Dharmakiirti was a very confused puppy. The Pramaa.na-siddhi chapter
is decidedly dualistic, while in latter parts of the Pratyaksha
chapter he was overcome with idealistic silliness. Perhaps it was
something he drank. Or smoked. Or perhaps he just couldn't handle
the fact that in his attempt to refute the materialists of his day,
all he could produce were specious arguments and tired Buddhist
clichés.

> Since Buddhist followers are frequently admonished not to resort
> to this practice, could that be what the Buddha was alluding to?

I think that the emphasis in the Buddhist texts was on doing things
for material gain. Monks were enjoined not to do healing for money
(or other gain), but were encouraged to do healing pro bono. As for
mantras, the texts that come most readily to my mind say that
bhikkhus, unlike Brahmans, do not drone mantras for a livelihood.
The implication here seems to be that those disgusing Braahma.nas
were duping the gullible public into believing that paying a priest
to drone a mantra would lead to some kind of benefit for the
sponsor. In the Sutta Nipaata we find a very funny spoof in whihc it
is said that Brahmins devised the custom of reciting mantras as a
means of making big money and attracting beautiful women.

The Buddha took the moral high road on this one and said that a TRUE
Brahmin would never resort to such lowly behaviour as those debased
Brahmins who performed religious ceremonies in return for money or
women. But eventually Buddhist monks got tired of being poor and
celibate (who can blame them) and starting doing all the things that
so many other people do when they want money for nothing. They
chanted and droned and muttered along with the best of them. (How
else could they pay for all those magnificent temples and palaces
that dot the Asian countryside, to the previous delight of kings and
to the present delight of tourists?)

> I believe there are elements of belief in rebirth which lead to
> compassion.

Almost any idea at all CAN lead to compassion, if one is predisposed
to being compassionate in the first place. But if one needs to be
convinced that compassion is a good idea, then probably no argument
in the world will suffice.

> If I believe and understand that other sentient beings are
> undergoing cyclic rebirth, it leads me to consider being more
> compassionate towards the other beings.

If I believe and understand that every sentient being has only one
life, it leads me to seeing to it that the one life they have is
qualitatively good and as long lasting as circumstances will permit.

> The concept of a cyclic process seems probable to me.

What would you say the probability is? And how do you calculate it?

> I don't think rebirth is separate from the changing nature of
> the world we see around us.

Well, if rebirth means nothing but change, then it is trivially true
that rebirth is all around us.

> My point is that if there is some remaining chain of karma that
> impels the body, speech, or mind of the Arhant to perform some
> action, then that action will indeed be done.

I don't think karma is ever seen as being quite so deterministic as
that. A particular action may have the effect of predisposing
someone to act in a certain way, but the result of karma is never
such that one is unable to choose to act differently. The very fact
that an arhant is alive indicates that he has a life force. This
life force is said to be karma-resultant, not karma producing. From
the fact that one has a life force, one can infer nothing about the
living being's behaviour.

> Under the scheme you seem to be presenting, the process of
> waking up every day, begging, eating, acknoweldging the presence
> of others, teaching the four Noble Truths and Dependent
> Origination etc. are all free of karmic significance for an
> arhant.

That's right. It is said that an arhant produces no karma
whatsoever. That's because karma is an action done under the
delusion that there is an enduring self and a wish, even a very
subtle one, that the self continue to endure. That delusion and its
attendant craving are allegedly extinguished in an arhatii, so her
actions have effects but are not karmas. For example, an arhant's
kindness has the effect of making another feel good but does not set
in motion the usual mechanisms that lead to further existence. This,
in any event, is how I understand the texts I have read. Perhaps my
understanding is incorrect.

>    I  have  always felt that those rules don't follow buddhist spirit.

Very little of what happens in the vinaya represents the spirit of
the Buddha as such. Rather, the rules are the result of compromises
with the larger community that gave the begging community their
alms. The Buddha could not let the bhikkhu-sangha (most literally
translated as the gang of beggars) be perceived as a bunch of social
misfits. Therefore, he excluded anyone who would give the wrong
impression, "wrong" being here defined as anything that would
diminish the credibility of the bhikkhu-sangha in the eyes of the
general public.

> When I asked in a well known monastery for its engaged practice
> about those rules, a senior monk replied me that those persons
> were an hindrance for the sangha. I felt sad and then I decided
> that that rule was not part of my buddhist baggage.

If you are not in the business of begging for a livelihood, the
vinaya rules are of absolutely no concern to you. I think the
bhikkhu-sangha is very unlikely to be a significant feature of
Buddhism in the West, which means that we Westerners will not have
to deal with the public relations problems that plagued the Indian
sangha. We will, of course, have to deal with other problems, some
of which will arise precisely because we have been liberated from
the problems of depending for spiritual guidance on mendicants who
can dedicate 100% of their time and energy (in theory at least) to
being Dharma teachers and practitioners.

> Anyway, when I have a headache and then it ceases, in my daily
> life I use to say myself, "Oh, God, I feel good".

As I'm sure you have read, Benito, this is exactly the explanation
of Nirvana that Nagasena offers to Milinda in Las Preguntas de
Milinda Rey. Nirvana, says Milinda, is nothing but the cessation of
pain. Therefore, it has no existence of its own, hence no beginning
and no end. This is why we can say it is not a conditioned thing.
But from the perspective of someone who has been in pain, the
absence of pain feels like something positive, real and blissful.

> For those that get bored with the basic teachings, and lose
> patience with apparently simple basic practices

Wait just a dangburn minute there, young fella. As I understand it,
the WHOLE POINT of the basic teachings and their attendant simple
practices is to get bored. Otherwise, one gets interested in things,
and that leads to all sorts of bhava (defined as striving for
continued existence). The old man taught that the best way to attain
bhava-nirodha (the cessation of striving for continued existence)
was to become disenchanted with everything, which means losing one's
curiosity by reining in both the senses, the active intellect and
the imagination.

> the Buddha could have considered something extra needed to be
> added at subsequent turnings to hold the attention of those with
> a more active intellect and/or a more active imagination.

Don't pin all those extra teachings on the Buddha. They are too
incompatible with the strategy he first set out in all those
basic, simple boring teachings. All the fancy bells and whistles
that later Buddhists added to the simple yaana designed by the
Buddha, thereby turning it into a gaudy gas-guzzling hepmobile, had
to have been devised by folks who just failed to understand the
Buddha's dharma.

> Whether an excess of these two constitutes being 'advanced' or
> 'higher' is for the individual to sort out for his/her self.

How could anyone consider Mahayana and tantra advanced? Clearly,
they are both retreats into the very madness from which the Buddha
in his infinite kindness offered an escape.

Staying, as always, well clear of controversy, I remain
Simply and boringly yours,
Dayamati

--------------------------------------------------------
Dayamati Quotes

Vasubandhu and Dharmakiirti both argued, convincingly I think, that
nothing at all is required to make a thing cease to exist. Even the
kleshas extinguish themselves quite automatically. They can't help
it. What keeps kleshas coming along is the fact that we make effort
to nourish them and renew them. No effort at all is required to stop
the kleshas coming. All that is needed is to stop making the effort
to keep greed, hatred, delusion, craving for existence and various
pernicious views alive. So if you haven't yet realized nirvana,
Bobby, it's not because you haven't tried hard enough. It's because
you've been trying too hard. Take your foot off the accelerator and
coast to a nice, easy stop. That's all there is to it, I promise.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks to you like a nail. 

I have never minded appearing foolish to ignorant people, for it is
their way to see foolishness wherever they turn their gaze 

This is how I see melancholia. I love melancholia. It is a sadness that
stems from looking at the world and knowing it could be so much better
but for some reason is not. It is a sadness that inspires me and
sustains my practice. But melancholia is also a joy that comes from
looking at the world and knowing that it could not be much better after
all and so must be accepted just as it is. And therein lies release from
the sting of sadness and an awakening to the joys of sadness. 

The terms "buddha", "arhant", "outflows" and "nirvana" were all borrowed
by the Buddhists from Jains and Brahmins. 

Apparent joys in which there are hidden sorrows. The Buddha referred to
them as being like a razor blade coated with honey. An example of such a
joy is any kind of pleasure that occurs in the mentality of one who has
not overcome a tendency to form attachments. A sorrowless joy, by
contrast, is a moment of pleasure experienced by someone who can easily
let it go without regret when it naturally disappears. 

Get the Goat: This expression derives from an old American custom among
people who raced horses. If an owner had a very nervous horse, he would
put a goat in the stall with the horse, which had the effect of calming
the horse down so it could save its energy for a race. A rival who
wished to keep the horse nervous would get the goat from the stall. Some
meditation teachers believe in getting the goats of their disciples.
That is, they take away all external aids to ease and comfort so that
the disciple has to face his own mind without props, without external
kinds of security. The philosophy of such teachers is that the Buddha
was a puriso-damma-sarathi, a trainer of the wild beast in man. Like
some horse trainers, these meditation teachers believe in getting the
goat out of the stall and then working at the horse to break its will.
The technique works most of the time. It works just often enough that
people sometimes forget there are other methods of taming wild beasts. 

What fans? As I am sure you are aware, the word "fan" came into English
as a shortened form of the word "fanatic" (from the Latin "fanaticus",
meaning "associated with a temple"). A fanatic is one who offers
enthusiastic but uncritical acceptance. It is my most ardent hope that I
personally have the uncritical acceptance of no one, for you are right
in observing that those who offer uncritical acceptance of anyone are in
for disappointment (dukkha). 

I have written at some length about teachers in a variety of places.
There is no need to repeat that here, beyond saying that everyone,
without exception, is capable of some degree of self-deception. It is
alarmingly easy, as the Buddha often pointed out, to err on the side of
seeing oneself as more virtuous than one really is. While it is not
necessary to have a formal teacher to help one see one's own
shortcomings, it does help considerably to have a willingness to listen
to what others say about one's conduct and the effect it has on them.
Without such willingness, no teacher is likely to be of value. With that
willingness, then everyone becomes one's teacher. 

The Mongolian invasions of every part of Asia and central Asia had a
sweeping impact on Buddhist institutions and eventually on doctrines
that were invented to support those institutions. It is to the Mongols
that we owe such institutions as the Dalai Lama and other tulkus. The
threat of Mongolian invasion was of tremendous importance in Japan and
on the Japanese Buddhism of the Kamakura period. Virtually every from of
Buddhism that is still extant in Japan was founded in that very rich and
fertile period. The Mongols also had a huge impact on Buddhism in China,
Korea and Vietnam. And in Central Asia, once the centre of the greatest
Buddhist thinkers and translators, the Mongolian invasions nearly wiped
Buddhism out and ushered in centuries of persecution and ruin. I can't
think of one other series of events that has had a greater impact on
Buddhism in the world than the Mongol invasions (with the possible
exception of the incursions of Alexander the Great). 

The early Buddhist position was that pleasure is to be cultivated, but
with an awareness that nothing lasts and therefore any pleasure is bound
to be fleeting. Resisting the inevitable decay of a source of pleasure
is therefore a cause of frustration (dukkha) and disappointment. 

It might help you to study Islam more carefully. Like most products of
human beings, it is a mixture of very fine ideals and principles and
rather poor behaviour on the part of some people. My own experience with
the Muslims with whom I work is that they are among the kindest and most
ethical people with whom I work, and in the case of most of them these
qualities stem from their religious training. I have also found that as
a rule in my experience it is Muslims who have the deepest sympathy with
and understanding of Buddhism. I have had more useful and productive
discussions about my practice with Muslims than with members of any
other religion (including, sad to say, Buddhists). Islam has little to
do making North American culture such a hideous blight on this
overcrowded planet. I must say, I can easily understand why some Muslims
think of America as the great Satan. I can easily see why Muslims would
just like to be left alone and not overrun by American culture and
values. 

A few years ago, one of the people who meditated with my group every
week was a woman from Saudi Arabia. She told me once that she had heard
so much about the freedom of North American society that she was very
excited to come here to go to a major university. At the end of her four
years here, she couldn't wait to go home. She had known several women
who had been raped and badly beaten up in robberies, something she had
never experienced in the Middle East. She felt afraid to go outside at
night, even with other women, a fear she had never experienced in the
Middle East. But the biggest disappointment of all was how people used
their freedom. She said "These people have more freedom of speech than
anyone anywhere in the world. And what do they do with all that freedom?
They talk of nothing but food and sex. Every conversation eventually
turns to sex and food. What a tragic waste of freedom!" I think the
woman had a point. 

I have never quite seen why people find it interesting to discover that
someone does not practice what (s)he preaches. After all, no one aside
from buddhas should be expected to be consistent in the application of
lofty ideals. So when someone points out that Mr X does not walk his
talk, then one is only making the trivial observation that Mr X is
human. 

Hypocrisy is pretending to have feelings or convictions that one does
not really have. There is nothing hypocritical about reading a news
group but not making contributions to it, any more than there is
anything hypocritical about reading books but never writing one or
watching movies but never making one. And there is nothing hypocritical
about saying that the quality of what one reads is generally so poor
that it does not inspire one to say anything in response. 

As a Buddhist I have tried to cultivate a habit of thinking carefully
and not making sweeping generalizations about very complex phenomena. If
one is going to open one's eyes to reality, then one should open one's
eyes to all of reality, and that involves trying to sort out the various
elements in complex issues. 

Like many products of post-Enlightenment Western society, I place a very
high value on an open society in which everyone is given free rein to
express views and present scientific findings. I am not blind to the
fact that many societies do not promote such openness, and I suppose I
would probably rather not live in a society in which freedom of speech
is severely restricted. On the other hand, I am aware of the fact that
my preference for an open society is itself a result of indoctrination
and conditioning and is by no means absolute, and I can very easily see
that if I had lived elsewhere or in other times, my values would surely
be quite different from what they are. This makes me somewhat sluggish
in finding cause to condemn others. 

During my misspent youth, I worked on a cattle ranch for about half a
year. I was appalled by the routines that animals were put through:
branding, castration, round-ups and that final ride in a crowded cattle
truck to be slaughtered. This has all moved so far away from the time
when people killed an animal in the hunt. For me this is not an ethical
issue. I have no use for arguing with people about the morality of what
they eat. When people ask me to justify being a vegetarian, I simply
tell them that I cannot stand to see anything in pain, and whenever I
can avoid being part of a process that involves inflicting pain and
death, then I avoid it. 

It's true, I am quite convinced, that human beings are built to be
omnivores, which means we are built to eat animal protein as well as
fruits and vegetables. If you look at the diets of many peoples, they
got their animal protein by eating insects, lizards and rodents. Eating
the amount of meat in a hamburger or a steak is really excessive. So if
you really want to follow the diet that you were evolved to digest, you
might swallow a couple of beetles and a horned toad very week. I don't
like to see even cockroaches suffer, so I'm willing to risk my own
health rather than terminate the lives of other critters. As I say, I do
not see this as an ethical issue but as a matter of personal aesthetics.

There are two ways of looking at karma. One way is the popular way,
which is little more than a way of frightening people and keeping them
in line. That way of looking at karma will not bear up very well at all
under close examination; it is not meant to really. It is in the nature
of inspirational fiction. There is, however, a second way of looking at
karma, and that is to see it primarily as a psychological principle.
Every deliberate action you do creates or reinforces a habit. This is
especially true of the principal kind of action, which is the forming of
intentions and attitudes. (Physical actions and speech are derived from
those intentions and attitudes.) Getting into the habit of seeing faults
makes one generally more unhappy, less resilient. Getting into the habit
of seeing virtues makes one more cheerful, patient and loving. It feels
better to love than to hate. It's really that simple. This is how karma
is discussed in classical Indian treatises on the subject. It has little
to do with ethics and justice, much to do with health and well-being.
Asking why bad things happen to good people is not the sort of question
to ask in the context of karma. A better question to ask is why do bad
things destroy some people while bringing out the best in others? There
is an Indian saying that hardship is like a grindstone. Put clay to a
grindstone, and the clod crumbles. Put gold to it, and the gold becomes
bright and shiny. If you stick around this news group, you'll witness
the crumbling of many clods. Those who crumble are those who still have
unrefined characters, which is just another way of saying bad karma. As
their attitudes improve, they become more refined, and then hardships
make them shine like burnished gold. That is good karma. And that's
really about all there is to it. 

There are quite a few of us around who feel that life really started to
get interesting when the women in our lives hit menopause, and our own
sexual desires took a dramatic decline, allowing us for the first time
to get real enjoyment out of the finer things in life. I sometimes
suspect that some women do not fully appreciate how very difficult it is
to go through a day with a body filled with raging male hormones. It's
not much more fun for men that it is for the women who have to put up
with them. 

The very first philosophers who appealed to me were the Cynics, who were
so named because they lived like dogs. There is a great deal of
similarity between the Buddhists of ancient India and the Cynics of
ancient Greece. Eventually I grew tired of the Cynics and graduated to
the more upbeat philosophy of the Stoics, whom I still admire deeply. 

In one of his essays on ethics, Aristotle has a long discourse on
friendship. One of the legitimate kinds of friendship he recognizes is
one based on an exchange of pleasure for money. When one considers what
a huge percentage of the economy in modern affluent societies is based
on the payment of money for pleasure and entertainment (professional
sporting events, films, theatre, art galleries, universities and so on),
it seems silly to single out the selling of sex as somehow
reprehensible. We're all whores here. 

In affluent consumerist societies it is rare that ANYTHING is pure and
fair and without exploitation. Drugs, poverty and pimps are part of the
very fabric of every consumer economy. (I am reminded of William
Borrough's brilliant observation that heroin addiction is the most
fitting metaphor for explaining the dynamics of capitalism. A market is
created by getting people addicted to what they do not really want or
need and then raising prices when demand increases. That's how
capitalism works. End of story.) I do not believe in morality. It is an
outmoded idea that I find increasingly useless and cumbersome, so I am
not inclined to agree that capitalism is morally wrong. I do, however,
find it disgusting. I would rather live somewhere where it didn't exist.

A series of practices that obtain conditions for growth is not morality.
It is prudence. The difference, as I see it, is that morality pertains
to making value judgements about what is good and what is evil. Prudence
pertains to making observations about what works, that is, what leads to
a given set of specified desiderata. Not harming others a good strategy
to avoid what one does not wish to desire, namely, to have unpleasant
experiences. So it is about prudence, not about morality. 

As you know, the word "martyr" derives from the Greek word for
"witness". A person who died from the kingdom of earth to show others
the way to the Kingdom of God was called a "witness" in early
Christianity. The whole point of being a martyr was to emphasise the
distinction between the two kingdoms and to show the superiority of the
Kingdom of God. There was no better way to show one's conviction in the
superiority of the Kingdom of God than to give up one's life in the
kingdom of earth. That, as I understand it, was the principle of
martyrdom. A bodhisattva is someone who will stop at nothing, even his
or her own death, to help deliver others from pain and suffering. Unlike
the martyr, the bodhisattva does not seek death; he is merely willing to
accept death if that is what is required to help others. 

As I understand it, to undertake a training principle is to see that
principle as important enough that one will make a serious effort to
follow it. Failing in that undertaking is not at all the equivalent of
breaking a formal vow. If a monk breaks a paraajika rule, he stops being
a monk by the commission of the action he had vowed to abstain from. But
he does not stop being a Buddhist. He does not stop going for refuge. He
does not stop making progress towards liberation. When a Dharmachari
fails to follow a precept, he makes public confession and resolves to
make a strong effort not to break the precept again. This is similar to
what a bhikkhu does when he breaks any of the vinaya rules except for
the four paraajika rules. (Those are the four rules that, if broken,
result in the bhikkhu being excommunicated from the bhikkhu-sangha for
the remainder of his life.) 

There is an old saying in Biblical studies circles: "A text without a
context is a pretext." It is vital to recall the contexts in which
things are said. 

The best advice I ever heard was something my late Uncle Alden said to
my pappy. My pappy was arguing with somebody who kept twisting
everything he said. It was obviously getting pappy down. So old Uncle
Alden pulled gently at my pappy's sleeve and said "Don't bother trying
to reason with this man. He's an idiot." As you know, I don't believe
much in mantras. But I have found this mantra saves me a lot of time,
not to mention affliction. Say it a few times and see if it words for
you. "Don't bother trying to reason with this man. He's an idiot." 

All four of the noble truths are clearly developed and influenced by the
unexamined social prejudices of the time in which they were formed. 

Living when and where he did, the recluse Gotama could probably not even
conceive of a society in which women would be honoured as the social
equals of men. Nor could he easily imagine a society that would accept
women leaving the household life to become recluses. Depriving
households of their women would be perceived by mainstream culture as
such an outrageous and socially destructive move that many people would
immediately label the Buddha's movement as dangerous and seditious and
would not support them with alms. Without alms the bhikkhu-sangha could
not survive. And without the bhikkhu-sangha there is no Buddhism. So the
recluse Gotama had no choice but to follow what he knew were the
prevailing social attitudes of his day. This whole episode shows two
things: 1) Gotama the recluse was limited by the social conditions of
his time, and 2) followers of the Buddha need not be limited by the
social conditions that prevailed at the time of the Buddha. 

I would suggest trying to find a copy of a beautiful story written by
Elizabeth Coates called "The Cat Who Went to Heaven." It was written in
1935 but has been reprinted often. It's a booklet for children. It's
about an artistic monk who befriended a cat. Everyone was scandalized,
of course, because cats are usually considered symbols of selfishness
and pride in Buddhism. According to the traditional story, when the
Buddha died, all of nature wept and wailed, except a cat. The cat just
licked its paws and remained unmoved. So it's traditional in Buddhist
art to depict cats in very negative ways, almost as demonic creatures.
So when this artistic monk befriended the cat, everyone was shocked.
Coates tells a wonderfully moving story of overcoming prejudice with
love. If you have any heart at all, be prepared to cry. 

A common theme in the Pali canon is a set of four virtues called the 4
sangaha-vatthuuni, a set of four characteristics that when cultivated in
a monk or a lay person attract others to the Dhamma. They are daana
(generosity), peyya-vajja (kindly and pleasant speech), atthacariyaa
(purposeful, useful livelihood) samaanattataa (impartiality, treating
others as on a par with oneself). 

When I was first attracted to Buddhism, I went for the purely
rationalistic variety that existed only in the minds of 19th century
European admirers of Buddhism. I hated Vajrayana and Mahayana and
pretended that Theravada was very different from how it actually is. As
time went on, and as I meditated more, I found myself opening up to all
the forms of Buddhism. And also to many forms of Christianity, Judaism
and Islam. Paradoxically, the deeper my appreciation of Buddhism has
grown, the more respect I have for other systems of doctrine and
practice, both "religious" and "secular" (two terms that have nearly
lost their meaning for me). Perhaps what has most swayed me has been the
fact that I was been fortunate to meet a lot of very fine human beings
in this life, and they come from every religious and non-religious
tradition that samsara has to offer. 

"Siila" means "habit, custom". What Buddhism cannot exist without is
susiila (good habits). It cannot survive for long in dussiila (bad
habits). 

It would be difficult to distinguish a Buddhist from a materialist who
advocated moderation. 

Religion is best described as the systematic science of self-hatred. So
if a person is not filled with deep self-loathing, then he or she is not
practising religion correctly. This is certainly true of Buddhism. It's
all about despising the self from beginning to end. And Mahayana
Buddhism, with that bodhisattva ideal, is about hating oneself Big Time,
turning self-loathing into a cosmic dance. For me, the best antidote to
the Bodhisattva Malaise has been to read a bit of Chinese literature. I
love Chuang Tzu and some of the fellows reported by Huai Nan Tzu, such
as the guy who said "If I could save the entire universe from suffering
by plucking out a single hair, I would not do it" and "What difference
does it make whether one is good or bad, wise or foolish? The corpse of
a good sage stinks just as much as that of a foolish scoundrel." That
helps provide a bit of balance to the sometime sickening piety and
cloying goodness of Buddhist propaganda. 

The wise speak because they have something to say. The foolish speak
because they have to say something. 

Buddhist observations about conduct have nothing to do with morality.
They have everything to do with finding strategies for having one's
desires come true. 

If one has no alternative but to act in a given way, then that way of
acting is not heroic at all. It is merely necessary. 

99% of Buddhist practice involves what is called smrti, which literally
means remembering, although it is sometimes mistranslated as
"mindfulness". What is one supposed to remember? Past actions, past
mental states, past thoughts and their eventual consequences. Why does
one bother to remember such things? In order not to repeat unprofitable
patterns in the present and future. Right remembering of the past is
indispensable for right resolve for the future; both of these are
inextricable from the Eightfold Path. So forget this New Age Pseudo-Zen
"Live in the moment" crap. Buddhism, by way of contrast, is not about
going out of one's mind, but using the mind well to deal with whatever
arises without prejudice, sentimentality, dogmatism, attachment and
clinging. 

The fourteen unanswered questions are not called unanswerable
(avyaakaara.niiya) but unanswered (avyaakata). The reason they are not
answered by the Buddha is that the answers do not have any bearing on
the four noble truth and the eightfold path. This is the reason that he
himself gave for why he did not answer these questions. Instead of
saying that nirvana is inexplicable, which is contrary to anything found
in the suttas or abhidhamma, say what the Buddha himself said, which is
that knowing what happens after the death of an arhant has no bearing
whatsoever on the fact of dukkha, the cause of dukkha, the elimination
of the cause of dukkha and the method of eliminating the cause of
dukkha. 

One does not cling to hypotheses. One tests them. That is how they
differ from dogmas, which are held with a clinging attitude, a refusal
to let go, and a need to regard all as fools who are not similarly
afflicted with the blight of dogmatism. 

The whole point of practice is that, as time goes on, your mentality
rarely or never has negative and harmful characteristics, such as lust,
anger, confusion, pride, dogmatism, irresolution, laziness, anxiety,
shamelessnesss and lack of conscience. Whether the wholesome mentality
is achieved by following the breath or other methods, such as performing
rituals or studying abhidharma or worshiping buddhas and deities, does
not matter in the least. What matters is the result, not the method of
achieving it. 

you can lighten a cart by removing the wheels, but it won't be easier to
pull. 

News groups have some potential of intelligent discussion, but they are
not very well used for that sort of thing yet. They remind me of what it
might be like to discuss dharma in a strip club while a very loud band
is playing; the task is not entirely impossible, but the potential for
distraction is present. 

Jesus died young. Had he lived to be an old man, he might have become
more wise. Judging only from what is reported of his words and actions
in the Bible, I would say that Jesus was a brash, loudmouthed,
opinionated, argumentative young pup, filled with adolescent
misunderstandings of the religion of his fathers. Had he lived to full
manhood, he might have come to see some of the wisdom in the traditions
of the Pharisees, from whom he stole much thunder without ever learning
to make rain. If Paul or Tarsus had not mistakenly identified Jesus as
the Messiah (as the concept had been redefined by Paul himself), Jesus
would have been a very minor player upon the stage of world history. 

Anger is a very taboo response in Buddhism. To show any anger at all, or
even any irritation, invites people to say "Why, my darling, don't you
know that anger is one of the three poisons?" So when a person's ego
decides it is a Buddhist ego, it cannot admit that it feels anger. So
anger goes into the shadow. It still works, but only on an unconscious
level. It comes out, but always in veiled ways. Buddhists learn to be
very sneaky in their anger. They learn to veil it in the clothes of
Compassion. 

It is a delusion to say that life has a meaning that we discover in it.
It is also a delusion to say that life cannot be given a meaning. Life
has meaning only when we, the living, give it one. And each of us gives
it the meaning that best suits us. During the course of a lifetime, many
of us give life several meanings, often diametrically opposed to other
meanings we have given it before. The act of giving a meaning to life is
what I call mythology. A myth is a story we tell about our experience to
make it meaningful. It is useful to realise that experiences can be
given meanings in a multitude of ways. One can superimpose Buddhist
myths upon them, or Christian myths, or Bahai myths, or Subud myths, or
Islamic myths, or Taoist myths, or Vedic myths, or Upanaishadic myths,
or Puranic myths, or Teutonic myths, or Voodoo myths, or Hopi myths, or
Gnostic myths, or any combination of the above. The result of imposing a
mythic framework onto experience, if it is done mindfully, will be
twofold: 1) One will have made life meaningful, and 2) one will be
tolerant and accepting of others who make it meaningful in different
ways. If myth-making is not done mindfully, then one gets swallowed by
one's own stories, and the result of myth-making will be less joyful;
one will probably become rigid, inflexible, dogmatic, intolerant,
belligerent and (if I may use a technical term from Buddhist theory)
stupid (mudha). [The correct spelling is actually mu.dha, but spelling
Sanskrit correctly drives some people around the bend.] There is an
important different between being stupid (mudha) and joyous (mudita). 

They are both quacks in search of a duck. 

when you finally live up to this glorious description you give of
yourself, you will have earned my highest respect. Meanwhile, I take
what you say as a statement of your noble intentions. 

An incompetent teacher always blames his students. 

Human being are human beings, and Buddhists are not on the whole any
better or worse than anyone else. 

Which is worse: to be enlightened and not to know it, or not to be
enlightened and believe that one is? 

The Buddha never spoke in terms of enlightenment. He spoke in terms of
cultivating a healthy mind(kusala-citta) and attaining an end of mental
afflictions(kilesa-nirodha). The kilesas are traditionally numbered at
ten. They are: greed, hatred, delusion, conceit, dogmatism, doubt,
mental rigidity, anxiety, lack of conscience and shamelessness. Every
single one of these ten afflictions is psychological in nature. NIrvana,
also known as kilesa-nirodha, is an end to psychological afflictions. 

you must get it out of your head that Buddhism is a religion. It has
nothing to do with rituals, rites, metaphysics, creeds, doctrines and
superstitions. It is not at all a religion. It is a system of
psychotherapy. And it works. 

I think Buddhist practice does work. I think it works best when it is
kept pure, by which I mean free from religious notions, such as the
transcendental, enlightenment, mysticism and various other Western ideas
that have been superimposed upon Asian Buddhism as it has come West. 

What it is good to know is how much needless suffering there is in the
lives of people with whom one has regular contact. What is even better
is to have some idea of how to go about reducing this suffering. What is
best is to have the energy and the will to actually do some of the work
necessary to reduce that suffering. Compared to those matters, the issue
of enlightenment is pretty well a side-show. Funny how so many Buddhists
get distracted by the side-show and therefore never manage to find their
way into the Big Top. 

desire is conscious mental activity, but not all conscious mental
activity is desire. Stopping all thinking to avoid desire is a bit like
an alocohlic sawing off his legs to prevent himself from walking into a
liquor store. 

there is nothing that surpasses the elimination of the ten kilesa:
greed, anger, delusion, pride, views, doubt, sloth, anxiety,
shamelessness and immodesty. Even reducing them significantly brings
great joy. 

So when we focus on people and how they relate, we are engaged in
ayoniso manasikaara (careless thinking); careful thinking (yoniso
manasikaara) is focussing the attention on impersonal and fleeting
episodes of greed, generosity, hatred, love, delusion, insight, pride,
humility, cruelty, compassion, sadness, joy, irritation and equanimity
that fade away in the very moment they appear. 

All Buddhism need tell us is how to break the habit of ungrounded
thinking (ayoniso manasikaara) and to cultivate careful thinking (yoniso
manasikaara) so that we can engage in wholesome actions without any
thought of reward. 

Those who do not undertake the study of Pali are at the mercy of
translators. Such people are left to guess and to speculate about what
the text might be saying, could be saying, should be saying. It is no
wonder that such people often give up on texts and join the modern cult
of "personal experience". (The same thing happened in China, resulting
in the emergence of an impoverished sect known as Chan. History is
repeating itself. It is a history of laziness and contempt for
intellectual effort.) 

Different people are bound to have different ways of saying things.
Different people will have different experiences. Different people will
find that different techniques of meditation work best for them. This
variety is quite natural and expected. That is why I tend not to be
impressed when people try to reduce the entirety of Buddhism to one
simplistic principle and then go around saying that everyone else is
wrong because they are not liberated. 

It is no accident, I think, that many words for soul are connected with
the breath. The word "aatman" means breath, as does the Greek "psuche"
and the Latin "spiritus". When one sees the changes that immediately
overcome a living being when it stops breathing, it is no wonder that we
say "The soul has left the body". It is really just another way of
saying "The body has stopped breathing and can no longer sustain
consciousness". 

People who live in areas where many languages are spoken quickly get
used to the plain fact that they cannot understand everything perfectly,
even if they learn a dozen languages. 

It is important to emphasise that study of languages and texts is not
necessary for progress. What I find unfortunate is when people go
further than that and make the claim that the study of languages and
texts is an obstacle to progress along the path. It is one thing to say
"Given my situation and aspirations, I don't need that", but it is quite
another to say "Nobody needs that, and in fact having that is an
impediment." It is when one says the latter that the mind- door begins
to slam shut. 

If one wishes really to eradicate the kilesas, it is more useful to 
engage in various kinds of wholesome thinking: thinking clearing about 
the experience of the past and the present, seeing patterns in them 
and then making a firm resolve to eradicate the troublesome patterns. 
This firm resolve is called Right Resolve, and it is the second item 
on the Eightfold Path.

The question whether a Buddha dies is NOT one of the unanswered 
questions.  The answer to this question is most definitely Yes.  
Everyone dies, without exception.  The unanswered question is: when a 
Buddha dies, does he enter into a different sort of existence, or does 
he stop existing altogether?  This question is not answered for the 
reason that the answer does not matter at all.  Whether or not a 
Buddha continues to exist or stops existing, discontent (dukkha) 
occurs and has as its basis craving (tanhaa) rooted in misconceptions 
(avijjaa).  In other words, the four noble truths remain unaffected by 
the answer to the question of what happens to a Buddha (or anyone 
else) after death.  There is no element whatsoever of faith in this 
"stock" answer; it is quite a sensible recognition that some 
questions, whether or not they can be answered, are irrelevant. 
Nirvana does not defeat death.  What it does defeat, however, is the 
fear of death, the dread of mortality.  It is this dread of dying (and 
of all change) that makes people ask such questions as "What happens 
to a Tathaagata after he dies?  What happens to an arahant after he 
dies (or an arahatii after she dies)?" To a person whose passions have 
been extinguished (cf. nibbuta- kileso), such questions are not in the 
least interesting, except as idle curiosity.  Such questions come to 
have no more urgency than the question "What sort of bird is that over 
on the juniper tree?"  As a practical matter, when a person still 
finds that the question "What will happen to me when I die?" causes 
anxiety or fear or hope or any other kind of heightened interest, then 
one still has some kilesa to get rid of.  And the task at hand is to 
work on getting rid of those kilesas, not to engage in speculation and 
elaborate theorising (papanca).

I think of pretending to be good as a necessary step to take on the 
way to actually being good.  If one pretends long enough, it becomes 
quite genuine.  (Think of a toddler when it takes its first two steps 
and then falls down.  All the adults in the room clap their hands with 
joy and say "Oh look!  Baby is walking now!  Of course we all know 
that baby is not genuinely walking yet, but we also know that if baby 
does not keep taking a few step and falling down, baby will never 
become a genuinely mobile biped.) 

Being aware is not always sufficient.  One must also be sufficiently 
horrified by the contents of one's mind that one takes steps to 
changing one's mentality for the better.

What virtue is there in having an original thought if it is a stupid one?  

Memory is invariably faulty.  People remember what makes an impression 
on them, and what makes an impression on them is usually something 
that reinforces a prejudice of some kind---or something that strongly 
challenges a stereotype that one has allowed to build up.  People 
remember what they need to remember to make sense of the present, and 
when the present demands an embellished story, memory provides one.  
This is very true of me; I freely admit that my memory is almost 
completely fictitious.  It is, I suspect, equally true of most people 
who are honest with themselves.  It is, I think, a very naive person 
who takes his or her personal memory at face value. 

It amazes me how obsessed people have become with youth and how 
unwilling they are to accept age gracefully.

Can you think of a better way to stop suffering than to become
contented with it?

Surely dreaming puts one in touch with many important things that one 
would otherwise miss.  I would never give up dreaming, imagining and 
fantasy.  Of course, I do them all quite mindfully. The present is the 
mind dreaming. Present perceptions are dreams. 

Did you know that the word "religion" is said by some to come from the 
Latin verb meaning "to reread"?  Reading something again and again is 
the very heart of being religious.

When some people look at the full moon, they see only the dark spots.

There are two kinds of duality: useful, wholesome ones and pernicious, 
unhealthy ones.  There are two kinds of dichotomy: true ones and false 
ones. The Buddha made it very clear that the task of being free from 
those nasty afflictions is not to get rid of ALL duality (which is 
impossible and absurd on the face of it) but only of BAD duality. 

The human psyche has no fixed age. We carry with us all the traces of 
things we did and thought as wee babes, and we carry within us all the 
tendencies that made it possible for our ancestors to evolve from a 
blob of mucus in the ocean to the most complex and dangerous animal 
that has ever stalked the earth. A human body may be a particular age, 
but the soul within it can be all ages at once. Its age can never be 
accurately assessed.

If you don't trust what I say, then you will think about what I say, 
which is much better than believing it.

I am quite comfortable with the fact that I am getting older and have 
few years of life left in me. The passage of time has never bothered 
me in the least. On the contrary, I rather like it, because I love 
change and variety. So I have no need to pretend that time is an 
illusion. 

That is a fundamentally flawed doctrine for which I have yet to 
discover a practical use. But if you find it useful, then I rejoice 
for you. 

Yes, it has been a pleasant moment. But now it has slipped into the 
past. Perhaps a similar event will occur in the future.

I have run into quite a few people over the years who state in no 
uncertain terms that they are fully enlightened and have a capacity to 
see the folly in everyone around them.  They all exhibit an 
interesting pattern of behaviour. They attack others for being fools 
and slaves to tradition.  They immunize themselves against all 
criticisms by saying that people who are still deluded cannot grasp 
the mentality of someone who is fully enlightened.  And the more they 
are tested, the more vicious and punitive they become in responding.  
In the end, the effect they have on most people is that people 
conclude "If that is enlightenment, I'd rather not attain it."  Of 
course, when people do conclude that, it only reinforces the 
"enlightened" person's view that deluded people love to wallow in 
their delusion and do not even have the ability to recognise True 
Enlightenment when they see it.

Forgive yourself, and you'll find that you can more easily forgive 
others.

Anything that is effective at all can be abused in the wrong hands. 
The only way to make any method of training failsafe is to make it 
completely ineffective. 

You find others to be inadequate and flawed.  Just out of curiosity, 
how much does this phenomenon that you observe all around you deviate 
from what you expect and hope to see?

The only wasted time is that not spent dying. 

The principal failing of modern Buddhism is that most modern Buddhists 
fail to realise that monks are meant to set the standard of conduct 
for all people.  So anything that is addressed to a monk is addressed 
to everyone, not necessarily as a commandment that must be a obeyed, 
but as a piece of advice that if obeyed would lead everyone to greater 
peace and happiness.

In the Anguttara-nikaaya [the Buddha] says that for anyone to cut a 
limb from a tree that has provided shade is a shameful act of 
ingratitude.

In the Vinaya there are elaborate guidelines for where a monk may make 
a dwelling.  He is not to cut down any living trees or shrubs but can 
make a shelter only from fallen branches.  He is not to build a 
dwelling in a place that will disturb small animals, birds, ants or 
other insects.  He is not to dig the earth, lest it kill worms or 
disturb larvae.  He is not to irrigate, lest it drown small creatures.  

Buddhism in India had relatively few followers among the agricultural 
classes.  It appealed mostly to brahmins (who worked as teachers) and 
to merchants.  It has been estimated that one of the biggest factors 
in the spread of Buddhism was the fact that so many of its followers 
were traveling merchants. 

My favourite translation for the word "dukkha" is "disappointment." 

There are no bad events. There are just events. When people do not 
like what happens, they call the events bad. Bad things happen to 
people because people do not accept what happens.

According to the insights of the Buddha, when you say "Something 
happened" you are less likely to experience dukkha than when you say 
"Something happened TO ME."

I make tentative hypotheses and hold them until evidence from personal 
experience comes along to prove the hypothesis false. 

I have known thousands of people, not one of whom was infallible. It 
is not, therefore, unreasonable to hold the view that no one is 
infallible.

Moreover, infallibility is not at all necessary for the task set by 
Buddhism. All one need know is the nature of dukkha and the means of 
eliminating its causes. That takes very little knowledge. It 
apparently requires a certain amount of courage, but even that 
appearance is deceptive. How much courage does it take to let go of 
something that is causing you pain and harm?

One does not need to meet a Buddha in person to know what causes 
dukkha and how to eliminate it. That is quite enough knowledge for me. 
Anything more would be superfluous.

there is suffering, and there is a cause thereof. When the cause is 
removed, the effect is also removed. 

When one is deeply contented, then one has no need for any living 
presence other than one's own mind. Anything more would be an excess. 

What difference does it make to you whether it is a religion or a 
philosophy? Obviously these words, "religion" and "philosophy", have 
significance to you, and they evoke emotional responses and carry all 
kinds of associations that trigger approval and disapproval in you. 
But Dharma practice is still Dharma practice, no matter what you call 
it. It is something to do, not something to put labels on. 

One way to do Dharma practice is to become more mindful of the effect 
that various labels have on you. One way to practice mindfulness might 
be to try to figure out what in your particular conditioning leads you 
to favour thinking of Buddhism as a philosophy rather than as a 
religion. What is lost for you when you think of Buddhism as a 
religion? What in your background makes you think and feel this way? 

The question of what the Buddha taught is just about impossible to 
answer. There are so many claims made by so many Buddhists. Those who 
worship the Buddha in ways that may strike some people as being 
similar to how some people worship some gods do so on the authority of 
texts that they believe came directly from the Buddha. So in their 
view they are indeed following the teachings of the Buddha. Why 
dispute their claim? Perhaps they are not following the teachings that 
inspire you personally. But that is not something that need concern 
you. All that need concern you is what teachings you find helpful and 
inspiring in your project of reducing the amount of avoidable dukkha 
in your world.

Most people who are attracted to Buddhist teachings recognise in the 
teachings something so familiar that they feel they have been 
Buddhists all along. It is more a matter of discovering that they are 
already Buddhists rather than becoming Buddhists. 

It would be better to discover for yourself what is true than to agree 
with anyone. It is only my opinion, but I think that anyone who tells 
you that you have an obligation to believe anything is a person from 
whom you should walk away, slowly but deliberately.

The Middle Way, I think you'll find, is a pretty broad avenue. All you 
really need to do is stay out of the gutters.  

I think it goes without saying that some people misunderstood what the 
Buddha said. I think it also goes without saying that the Buddha said 
some things that were false. He was a human being, and no human being 
is infallible. What this means to me is that I am condemned to 
discovering the truth for myself, that I can rely on no one at all to 
show me or tell me the truth. I also take it for granted that I will 
fail, as everyone else has always done. But I hope to become a better 
man through my many inevitable failures.

It has never occurred to me to question it seriously, perhaps because 
I frankly have no vested interest in whether the theory is true or 
not.

The people who are unambiguously described as being liberated by their 
devotion to the Tathagata were people who developed the habit of 
imagining that the Buddha was with them at every moment of the day. 
Imagining themselves in the presence of the Buddha, they were mindful 
and very well behaved. According to the traditional commentaries, it 
was their good behaviour that made it possible for them to be free of 
guilty consciences, and their clean consciences that made it possible 
for them to be fully honest and therefore capable of being mindful, 
and their mindfulness liberated them. So ultimately it is mindfulness 
that liberates. But it may be imagining the Buddha's presence that 
makes mindfulness possible for some. So does imagining the Buddha's 
presence make one free, or does mindfulness make one free? I would 
answer that with a question: Do you walk on your right 
leg or on your left leg?

If one is interested in biology and neurology, it would be daft to 
stop at the 7th century. If one is interested in bringing an end to 
the kinds of frustration that arise from unrealistic expectations, one 
need go no further than the sixth century BCE. Nothing of importance 
about the human condition has been discovered since then.

It is quite easy to know what the Buddha would have thought about 
cognitive neural science. He would have seen it as an irrelevant 
distraction from the task at hand. One can solve the problems he was 
interested in solving quite easily without having recourse to 
cognitive science. Of course, if you find philosophy of mind 
fascinating, then be fascinated by it. There is no harm in that. But 
neither that fascination nor what comes from indulging yourself in it 
is likely to further you long the path to the goal of eliminating 
desire-fueled dukkha.

as long as I have work to do within my own mentality, someone else's 
attainments, whether real or imagined, are of no interest to me.

Telling fools to go away is like shooing flies off a fresh turd. As 
soon as one is dismissed, ten more take his place.

If Buddhism does not appeal to you, don't practice it. Practice what 
you find helpful to yourself. Don't expect everyone to be attracted to 
the practices that attract you. No need for criticism. No need for 
objections. It's really that simple.

The Buddha readily acknowledged that women can 1) fully understand the 
Dharma, 2) attain full liberation from the passions, and 3) be 
excellent teachers.  His reluctance to let them join the sangha was 
not a reflection of their ability.  He never suggested that women 
could not practice Dharma.  Rather, he said that women should not 
renounce the household life.  To be more accurate, he said that if his 
Sangha allowed women to join it by renouncing the household life, then 
his vinaya-dhamma would not last as long as it would if only men 
renounced the household life.  I think this shows that the Buddha 
realised that society can easily do without men, but it crumbles 
without women.  Men are dispensable, but women are not.  

whether the Buddha himself actually taught something does not matter 
at all.  What matters is whether it is true.  How do you know what's 
true?  By testing everything you hear, including the things supposedly 
taught by buddhas and prophets and sages and kings. Would the four 
noble truths be false if they were spoken by Smokey the Bear instead 
of the Buddha? The Four Noble Truths are the only part of Buddha-
vacana (the words of the Buddha) that really matter.  And it makes no 
difference at all who said them.  That they are true is something we 
all verify daily by craving and being unhappy until we finally figure 
out that we'll be truly happy only when we stop craving. 

Hindu is an Arabic word for people who live in India.  The Buddha 
lived in India.  He is bound to sound like a Hindu.  How could he not? 
"Hinduism" was a name given to Indian religions by invading Arabic 
Muslims. The term was used to distinguish indigenous Indian religions 
from the religion of the Muslim colonizers. To the Muslims, everything 
in India was Hindu: Shaivites, Vaishnavites, Mimamsakas, Jains and 
Buddhists were all called Hindus. Eventually, the term was used more 
narrowly, excluding Buddhists and Jains. The constitution of India 
defines a Hindu as anyone living in India who is not a Muslim, a 
Christian, a Zoroastrian, a Jew, a Buddhist or a Jain. (It is still a 
matter of debate whether Sikhs are to be regarded as Hindus.) 
According to various authors who wrote in the 10th through the 12th 
centuries, there is a distinction between those Indian religions that 
accept the authority of the Veda and those that do not. Buddhists and 
Jains do not accept the authority of the Veda. All the various 
religions of India that do accept the Veda could collectively be 
called Hinduism. Hindus believe in a permanent self (aatman) and in 
the authority of the Veda, and Buddhists do not. 

Buddhism has become popular in the West because very few Western 
people understand what it is really advising them to do. 

If you insist that your trust was abused by someone, then you are 
likely to be reminded that your disappointment has every bit as much 
to do with your expectations as with the other's conduct. This is a 
basic principle of Buddhism. It is also said again and again that if 
another person's conduct is not good for you, then you should walk 
away from it.

What I have been trying to say is that no one is to be blamed for 
anything. If there is pain, it is to be alleviated. One of the way of 
alleviating one's own pain is to acknowledge how it came about. If one 
finds oneself repeatedly getting into the same painful situations, 
then seeing what kinds of patterns in one's own thinking may account 
for that is the only sensible thing to do. Laying blame is mostly a 
distraction from that crucial task of discovering what it is in 
oneself that leads one into painful and troublesome situations.

A teacher has only as much power as a disciple voluntarily gives to him.

1. If it is not true and not helpful, don't say it.
2. If it is not true but helpful, don't say it.
3. If it is not helpful yet true, don't say it.
4. If it is helpful and true, wait for the right time to say it. 

Warning in a general way about pitfalls is in keeping with the tenets 
of Buddhism. Referring to a specific person in a way that makes others 
cultivate negative thoughts towards the specific person is a violation 
of one of the four speech precepts. Telling people in general that it 
is a good idea to seek a teacher who is kind-hearted and to avoid 
teachers who are obviously seeking money and fame and pleasure is in 
keeping with Buddhist tenets. 

Stating one's opinions as though they were facts is acting either out 
of delusion or out of an intention to deceive. 

Any news service that is financed exclusively by corporate subscribers 
interested only in making profits is unlikely to be reliable. 

If one reads about conditions at the time of the Buddha, they were 
pretty awful. There were some very good people among his followers, 
but there were also quite a few people who could only be regarded as 
complete failures. Think of the monk who went around with a razor and 
slashed the throats of over sixty other monks to liberate them from 
their loathsome bodies. Or think of Devadatta, described many times as 
a model monk, who after thirty years of training decided to try to 
murder the Buddha and take over the sangha. Or think of the scandal of 
the prostitute found murdered on the grounds of a Buddhist vihara. Or 
think of Moggallana, who was brutally beaten to death by members of a 
religious community who disapproved of the Buddha (no doubt thinking 
he was the leader of a dangerous cult). All those events are reported 
in the early canon. Doesn't sound like the best of times to me. Sounds 
to me pretty much like every other age in recorded human history. 
Compared to then, our times are not much more (nor much less) dismal. 
I doubt very much that it is much harder or much easier now to be 
virtuous and/or attain nirvana than it ever has been.

It is in the nature of being confused that one cannot easily detect 
the exact nature of one's confusion. After all, if I knew exactly how 
and why I was confused, I would not be confused. I take it for granted 
that others can spot my confusion much better than I, and I can spot 
theirs more easily than they. 

I have found that one cannot get very far in trying to decide which 
party was right and which was wrong. The notions of "wrong" and 
"abuse" turn out not to be very helpful, I find. What is more helpful 
is to begin with the raw fact that there is pain and to work with 
that, leaving the issue of blame behind. 

Controversy is not at all the same as disharmony and conflict. I quite 
agree that disagreement is very stimulating and productive. But I have 
found that disagreement is most productive when it occurs in an 
atmosphere of trust and mutual respect. When people are given a chance 
to refine their thinking and change their positions for the better 
without having people jump up and down and pointing out how stupid 
they are for being inconsistent, then very good things evolve. But 
when there are people hanging around waiting to score points and make 
cheap shots, most intelligent people just get tired of the dialogue 
and go somewhere else.

A better strategy for contentment, I should think, would be to modify 
one's expectations in such a way as not to feel bitter when others 
fail to meet them.

The ideals of the European Enlightenment are endorsed by many nations, 
but I know of no nation that really lives up to them. I have never 
known any religious community that has quite reached its lofty goals. 
Practices never improve without principles that are higher than people 
are currently reaching.

I believe that it often happens in life that one person tries to help 
another but fails to do so. Sometimes one tries to help another but 
actually causes harm. In this latter situation, the person who was 
harmed may feel as though the other person was being deliberately 
harmful, while the person accused of being deliberately harmful may 
feel as though he was trying to be kind. In this situation, it is 
difficult for anyone to establish which side was right. There is a 
difference of perceptions that can never be resolved. In yet other 
situations, one person may feel that he has been harmed, while others 
do not agree that any harm has been done. This can also be a very 
difficult matter to resolve, especially when the harm is psychological 
or emotional. There can be considerable disagreement, even among 
experts, as to the extent to which a person has been damaged by a set 
of circumstances.

Most Buddhists that I know of acknowledge the importance of 
associating with good people (sappuriso) and avoiding the 
companionship of fools. The Buddha himself says that being alone is 
better than having the companionship of fools, but having the 
companionship of good friends is better than a life of solitude. Note 
that this does not imply that one needs a guru. It merely means that 
it helps to have friends who also respect Dharma.

There have always been Buddhists who tried to offer a fairly 
literalistic and linear view of rebirth. The linear view is that 
someone was one person in one life, then died, then was reborn as 
someone else. The heuristic view is that the process is much more 
complex and much less personal than that. In this heuristic view, 
there is no linear process whereby someone is a person in one life and 
then dies and then and is then reborn. Rather, there are impersonal 
patterns of events of various types that recur in predictable ways. 
People who cannot grasp the concept of non-self superimpose a notion 
of personal identity upon these impersonal events. So they believe 
that persons die and then are reborn. But those who grasp the reality 
of non-self do not see things in such terms at all. They stop thinking 
in terms of rebirth altogether and think in terms of impersonal 
causality. Such people realise that rebirth is ultimately a falsehood, 
a sort of myth superimposed upon events through ignorance; this myth 
is, however, capable of helping one understand the true nature of 
things. It is, in other words, heuristic (which means that it leads to 
a discovery of how things really are). This view that I have called 
heuristic may sound modern, but it fact it is found in the Pali canon 
and in hundreds of texts through the ages. It is a sophisticated view 
(and therefore not very popular). 

Christianity has nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus of 
Nazareth. It has to do with a redefinition of the concept of the 
Messiah (Christos) by a Jew named Saul, who called himself Paul and 
was eventually deemed a Saint.

you cannot will yourself to be a more contented, more compassionate or 
more useful person. The best you can do is to let go of the idea of 
control. If you can let go of the illusion of being in control and 
just ride with the impersonal flow of events, you will surely face 
whatever happens with calm, perhaps even with cheer. 

the doctrine of anatta: Most people translate that word as "non-self", 
but the sayadaw translates it as "non-mastery". The fundamental 
problem most sentient beings face is that they imagine that they are, 
or wish that they were, masters of their own fates. They wish to 
control their bodies, control their thoughts, control their 
personalities. Buddhist practice, he explains, is all about 
discovering that none of these things can be controlled, none of them 
can be mastered. I can think of no discovery more liberating than 
that. Can you?

perhaps you have some of the qualities of a monk, such as generosity, 
compassion, deep contentment with few possessions or pleasures, 
integrity and kindliness in speech, indifference to comfort and 
discomfort, indifference to praise and blame and recognition from 
others, an active readiness to relieve the sufferings of beings around 
you and a remarkable ability to see what must be done to help others 
be less miserable.

What matters is the consistency of positive states following an 
experience. Buddhist practice is not about having peak experiences 
that make you or anyone else say "Wow!" It is about cultivating a 
consistently positive character. If positive states continue without 
interruption, if you never experience anger or impatience, if you no 
longer think in terms of who you were in the past, who you are now or 
who you might become in the future, if you act spontaneously without 
ever calculating whether actions will be of benefit to you in any way 
at all, then you might have entered the ariya-sangha, the community of 
noble men and women. This makes you a valuable member of society, but 
it does not make you in any way unique. 

what's going on? Conditioned events, one after another, all of them 
impermanent and impersonal in nature, none of them worth clinging to, 
none of them worth resisting.

If you overeat, you get fat. If you routinely disrespect others, you 
have fewer friends. If you cultivate kindness, you feel happy. If you 
step over the edge of a cliff, you fall. No one needs a god for all 
those events to occur. There is no judgement at all involved in any of 
them. There are merely actions followed by consequences. That is all 
you need to understand about karma. 

I think the *first* ingredient of any meaningful relationship is
self-respect. Respect for others flows naturally and gracefully out of
that. 

Those who have been battered by others need others to batter. May all
beings have someone to whip until they are ready to lay the whip down. 

Gotama said "Those who seek to meet God face-to-face are like a man who
says he is in love with the most beautiful woman in the world, and yet
when asked for particulars can tell you neither her name, her caste, her
place of birth nor what she looks like." 

Nibbaana is a name given to an absence. This interpretation is confirmed
by the fact that the standard ways of describing nibbaana are
kilesa-nirodha (cessation of afflictions) and bhava-nirodha (cessation
of arising). 

As Bhikkhu Buddhadasa said, in the final analysis you are the only
person who can teach you what you need to do to become free of your
particular forms of dukkha. So get started. Turn off your computer right
now and start watching your thoughts, your bodily sensations, your
emotions and your habitual behavioural tendencies. 

A karma is a wholesome one if it is an action intended to help; it is
wholesome even if the result is actually injury to another. Similarly, a
karma is unwholesome if it is an action intended to harm; it is
unwholesome even if the result is actually helpful to another. 

Now that you have explored the first noble truth, the fact that there is
dukkha, why not move on to the second noble truth? Why are you
experiencing dukkha? Were you disappointed that your question did not
receive a straightforward answer? Why were you disappointed? Was it
because you had a desire and the desire was not fulfilled as easily as
you had been hoping? Did you expect just to ask a question and get an
answer and be done with it? Was that a realistic expectation? Is life
normally so easy that all you ever have to do is form a wish and wait a
second for the wish to come true? After pondering this matter for a
while, you might come to realise that you are disappointed every time
you form an unrealistic wish or expectation. So if you would like not to
be disappointed you could stop having unrealistic desires. Welcome to
the third noble truth, namely, that the elimination of the root cause of
dukkha will result in the elimination of dukkha. Getting rid of
unrealistic desires will get rid of dukkha. Getting rid of unrealistic
desires is easy. All it requires is that you get real. But how exactly
can you eliminate unrealistic desires? What do you actually have to do?
That is the domain of the fourth noble truth. No one can tell you the
answer to that. It is your dukkha. You made it. You have to figure out
how to rid yourself of it. No one can do that for you. Others may be
able to tell you what worked for them, but you have to figure out what
will work for you. Good luck in figuring that out. Begin now, because it
may take quite a bit of time, probably several decades. Don't be in too
much of a hurry, but don't let a minute go by in which you are not
working on this problem. 

As early as the time of the emperor Ashoka, some Buddhists were claiming
that the Buddha had been fully omniscient. Other Buddhists rejected that
idea. One reason for rejecting it was that the Buddha had made mistakes
and had changed his teachings as a result of reflecting on his mistakes.
If he had been fully omniscient, he would probably not have made
mistakes, especially those that resulted in the deaths of numerous of
his disciples. Of course, one could claim that he DID know everything in
advance and simply went through the motions of pretending to be
ignorant, but that explanation does seem rather far-fetched and does
raise some awkward questions. So, said those who rejected the doctrine
of full omniscience, the simpler explanation of the Buddha's behaviour
is that his knowledge was limited, as is every man's knowledge. What he
did know, however, was of extraordinary value, for it enabled people to
become free of their dukkha, something that other kinds of knowledge
cannot do. So it's not that the Buddha knew everything but that he knew
everything of importance for being contented and eliminating dukkha. 
Many centuries later, Buddhists such as Dharmakirti, Dharmottara,
Jnanashrimitra and Shantarakshita argued at great length against the
doctrine that there is an omniscient god (or any other omniscient
being). One of their principal arguments was that this doctrine raises
another interesting question: Is the being who is supposed to me
omniscient also omnipotent and fully compassionate? If so, then why doe
he (or she) allow so many beings to suffer needlessly? If the omniscient
being were compassionate and capable of alleviating everyone's pain,
then surely she would do so. But obviously she has not done so.
Therefore, she must be either cruel or impotent. If she is either of
those, then she is no more worthy of veneration than anyone else.
Dharmakirti questioned what is gained by omniscience. All it would do if
it existed would be do enable one to see far. But he said "if we admire
something simply because it can see far, then we should worship
vultures." 

I am quite content not to know for sure, and my contentment arises from
a conviction that the knowledge would do me no good anyway. What I need
to know is only this: what is dukkha, why does it arise, can it be
eliminated and is there a method for eliminating it? As it happens, I do
know the answer to those questions, thanks to the teachings of the
Buddha. Thanks to that knowledge, I am much better off than I was
before. 

If you know that life leads only to death, why breathe? 

Gotama Buddha once said, when someone tried to trip him up by saying
that he denied the self and yet said that one should take refuge in
oneself, "I use the same language as all other people, but I am not
deceived by it." 

One can be perfectly contented with the flow of impersonal dharmas that
flow through awareness. A finely tuned awareness likes wholesome
dharmas, dislikes unwholesome dharmas and is indifferent to complex
constructs such as persons. 

There is but one moment to every life. 
The secret is to use that moment well. 

Here is what impresses me most about the Dalai Lama. He can discard his
own prejudices and preconceived ideas very swiftly and open himself up
to new ways of thinking. In this respect, he out-paces almost all his
devoted fans. As someone once observed, "If the Dalai Lama were not the
Dalai Lama, he would be seen as a heretic." He is far more ready to
discard literalistic interpretations of the Buddhist canon than are most
of his followers. He is astonishingly open-minded about the very things
that many of his Western fans are most closed-minded about. It makes for
an interesting contrast. As he himself quipped once at a meeting I was
at: "My followers worship me like a god. But very few of them listen to
what I have to say to them." 

I make no false claims concerning realizations. I claim merely to be
able to think clearly, to listen carefully, to ask intelligent questions
and to participate in a discussion in a way that usually benefits both
myself and other discussants. And I claim to be able to have the honesty
to admit the limits of my own understanding. 

You are quite right that I like myself very much. And I wholeheartedly
thank the Dharma for that. I like my kindness, my gentleness, my clarity
of thinking, my attentiveness to detail, my openness to a wide variety
of points of view, my playful sense of humour and my patience. I was not
born with any of these qualities, nor did I acquire them through
parental influence. I gained them by practising Dharma, by watching the
conduct of accomplished Buddhists and by making every effort to act as
they acted. The result is that I have become a person who I am very
comfortable being and whom I like very much. But not, I think, too much.
There is still much progress to be made, many faults to eliminate, and I
may still have a few years ahead of me to work on improving myself to
some degree. 

Thinking is one of the ways that one discovers the not-always-obvious
fact that everything is constantly ceasing and being replaced by similar
but subtly different substitutes. Some kinds of thinking reveals
reality. Other thinking obscures it. What is wanted is clarifying
thinking (yoniso manasikaara), or good mentation. What one wants to be
rid of is superficial thinking (ayoniso manasikaara), or wishful
thinking, or bad mentation. 

Samsara is the name we give to the fact that our expectations are not
met. But there is a remedy to that: cultivate realistic expectations.
See things just as they are, without judgement. Just see it. 

The Buddha told monks that they could eat meat if it was offered to
them, and if they knew it had not been killed especially for them.
(Monks who beg house to house are usually given leftovers from the meals
of householders. If a householder has prepared a meat dish and offers it
to a monk, a monk is not only allowed but obliged to eat it.) But even
if offered, some forms of meat were taboo. Monks could not, for example,
eat human flesh, nor could they eat the flesh of certain kinds of snakes
and quite a large number of jungle animals. In monastic communities in
which monks grow their own food, they never raise animals for slaughter.
In Mahayana communities, it is not uncommon for monks to raise their own
food. There are some Mahayana sutras that strongly denounce the practice
of eating meat at all, even when it is offered. They also strongly
denounce dairy products (on the grounds that milk is stolen from animals
rather than given by animals as a gift) and such products as honey
(which is also stolen, not given as a gift). So in some Mahayana
cultures you'll find very strict adherence to a vegetarian, even a
vegan, cuisine, not only among monks but also among especially pious
laity. On the matter of plant life, Jains in India took the position
that plants have consciousness and therefore should not be eaten. So for
a Jain saint, the most noble death is by fasting, abstaining completely
from all food and drink. Even Jain laity tend to eat only plant material
that can be taken from the plant without killing it. So they can eat
leafy vegetables or fruits or gourds, but not potatoes, carrots, leaks,
onions etc. Buddhists in India repudiated the Jain position and argued
that plant life is not sentient. Plants, they said, do not mind being
eaten, because they do not have minds at all. Animals obviously do have
minds, and they obviously hate being hunted down, captured and led to
slaughter. Somewhere in the midsts of all the positions that Buddhists
have taken (and still take), you will find one with which you feel
comfortable. You may find yourself following the trajectory of many
Buddhists, who discover that as they reflect more deeply on themselves,
they become much more aware of the pains of others, and this awareness
leads them to be less willing than before to eat the products of animals. 

It is noted that the Buddha told people in no uncertain terms not to
worry about what happens when a Tathagata dies. In other words, do not
worry (mentate) about what happens when a person who has experienced
nirvana finally dies. 

The Sanskrit word "mala" means a garland. Flowers strung together are
called a mala. Also seeds can be strung together, as can pieces of wood
or even bits bored out of a skull. A mala usually has 108 beads. The
number 108 was considered sacred all over India, and also in Babylon.
108 is two squared times three cubed, and this sort of thing fascinated
ancient peoples, who then attached various meanings to it. In every
Indian religion 108 is considered sacred. (Also significant are such
numbers as 43200, which is 108 times 4 times 1000.) In Buddhism there
are several explanations attached to the importance of 108. Generally
speaking, it is supposed to be the total number of afflictions. So
getting rid of all 108 afflictions requires doing 108 meritorious acts.
That's why Buddhists usually do prostrations in sets of 108, or make
offerings in sets of 108 things offered, or recite mantras 108 times. In
practical terms, the beads can be used to count repetitions of a mantra
or prostrations or whatever meritorious ritual one is performing. And
once the mala has come to be associated with cultivating a wholesome
mind, it can be worn around the neck or wrist just as a constant
reminder of the commitment you have made to cultivating wholesome
thoughts.

There's no element of faith involved at all. It does not make any
difference whatsoever who taught me that eliminating desire could lead
to eliminating dukkha. (Now that I think of it, I think I learned this
from my father and mother. I guess they learned it from their own
experience.) It then took very little experience with life to see for
myself that this was true. Et voila! I was liberated from some of my
discontent. That led me to suspect that I could get liberated from a
whole lot more. And I did. No faith involved at all. Just experience. 
Now it just so happens that of all the literature in the world, the
writing that comes closest to articulating what I myself have
experienced is the Pali canon and the Perfection of Wisdom literature.
So I value that literature, but it conforms to my own experience. Other
Buddhist literature is diametrically opposed to my experience, so I tend
not to quote it much, although I'm sure other people find it valuable.
Each of us experiences dukkha and liberation in slightly different ways.
For each of us there is some body of Buddhist literature that makes
quite a lot of sense, and other Buddhist literature that makes very
little sense (or at least has very little appeal). 

Remembering that everyone faces death, and remembering also that most
living beings fear death, is a way of developing sympathy and compassion
for other beings. The Buddha himself considered the recollection of
death and reflection on one's own immortality as one of the most
positive practices that a meditator can do. Because everyone dies, we
each have to face the loss of many friends and relatives during our
lives. When someone we love very much dies, we must learn to let go. A
funeral ceremony is designed to help the living let the dead go. There
is a Buddhist poem that goes: 
Every gain ends in a loss.
Every victory ends in defeat.
Every meeting ends in a parting.
Every life ends in death.
Because of the positive value given to thinking about death
realistically, and overcoming one's fear of death, Buddhist funeral
practices tend to be occasions for reminding the living of how temporary
and fragile life is, and for reminding the living that we all have this
one thing in common: we are all moving towards our own death. A typical
example of a sermon that might be read at a funeral is the following
poem, composed by the Buddha himself: 
Life is unpredictable and uncertain in this world.
Life here is difficult, short and full of pain.
A being, once born, is going to die,
And there is no way out of this.
When old age arrives, or some other cause,
Then there is death.
There is no way out of this.
Both the young and the old, 
Whether they are foolish or wise,
Are going to be trapped by death.
All beings are moving towards death.
Look: while relatives are watching,
Shedding tears and moaning,
People are carried away one by one,
Like cattle being led to the slaughter.
So death and old age are part of life.
Therefore, when the wise see how the world is,
They do not grieve.
You cannot know where the dead will go,
Nor can you know where the living have come from.
So it makes no sense to grieve.
Peace of mind cannot come from weeping and wailing.
On the contrary, it will lead only to more pain.
The person who cannot leave sorrow behind
Only travels further into pain.
Mourning makes one a slave to sorrow.
What people expect to happen
Is always different from what actually happens.
This fact leads to great disappointment.
This is how the world works.
So we can listen and learn from a wise person
As he gives up his grief.
When he sees that someone has passed away
And left life behind,
He says "I will never see this one again."
Of course, when someone we love very much dies, it is very difficult to
say goodbye. It is not easy to say "I will never see this one again." We
want very much to think that the loved one is still alive somewhere. For
this reason, in many cultures, survivors will offer prayers for the
deceased person, wishing that he or she will be born again in good
circumstances. It is customary, when a loved one dies, for the survivors
to place a photograph of the person on an altar. Every day, one may
offer flowers or incense or fresh water or prayers. Or one may just sit
quietly and remember the person who died, be grateful for having known
them. One can even be grateful for all the pain that one feels, because
that is a sign that once there was great joy and love between two living
people. This period of remembering the dead lasts for seven weeks. Then
one says goodbye and puts the picture away. It is important to be able
to move on with life after a loved one dies. It is important to allow
oneself to remember a person who has died, but it is also important not
to get trapped in memories and imprisoned in grief. 

Myself, I find it better not to pretend to be so sure of what goes on
in another's mind. It is amusing to speculate on such things, but it
is a fool's game to take such amusements seriously. 

A self-taught man has a fool for a student. 

I don't find the concept of enlightened person at all useful. I think
it gets in the way of serious Dharma practice. It is a very good
example of a concept that, when taken to correspond to an external
reality, impedes one's progress towards nirvana. 

No harm comes from thinking that something really exists. The harm
comes in thinking the really existing thing is permanent, part of
one's self or capable of being owned as one's property. 

Without conceptual thinking there is no liberation. This is so
because liberation itself is nothing but a concept. It is a concept
that is necessary only as long as one has the twin concept of
bondage. But if one does have the notion that one is suffering from
afflictions, then it is very useful to have the twin notion that one
can be liberated from those afflictions. 

The use of mantras stems from Vedic sacrifice. A poem or fragment
of poem used in the context of a sacrifice was called a mantra.
Whenever a poem was used in a sacred performance, it was preceded by
saying OM, and followed by saying SVAAHA. Technically, OM and SVAAHA
are not part of the mantra itself. They are like the quotation marks
around a quoted sentence. What the nice man asked you is "What does
the word TUTTARE mean?" The answer is that it has no meaning at all.
It is a nonsense syllable, as are many of the syllables in mantras
and dharanis. It is not a word (a sound associated with a meaning);
rather, it is a pure sound, like "Hey nonny nonny" or "Yadda yadda"
or "Diddle dee dum." Because it has no meaning of its own, any
interpretation can be associated with it in the context of a
particular ritual. In other words, it means whatever one wants it to
mean. This reminds me of something I read in Rodger Kammenetz's book,
_The Jew in the Lotus_. He reports going to some empowerment ceremony
with Allen Ginsberg. At one point in the ceremony, everybody was
loudly chanting OM MANIPADME HUM, and Kammenetz happened to look at
Ginsberg, who was rocking back and forth with a huge smile on his
face and loudly chanting EENIE MEENIE MINEY MO! 

I agree that it is not the goal of Buddhism to have conceptual
thoughts. It is also not the goal to have no thoughts at all. The
goal of Buddhism is not having any dukkha. There is no necessary
connection between having conceptual thoughts and having dukkha. So
getting rid of conceptual thoughts will not get rid of dukkha.
Getting rid of particular attitudes might help get rid of dukkha. And
one way of getting rid of some harmful attitudes is to think about
them conceptually. It is not the only way, but it is one of the ways.
The good news about Buddhism is that there are a lot of ways to
achieve the goal. 

If you cannot think clearly, then it is better not to think at all.
But if you can think clearly, it is better to use that ability
towards the end of eliminating dukkha. 

Let children be children. If they want to meditate when they grow up,
they'll find their way to it. If you are the kind of person they would
like to be when they grow up, they will readily follow your examples and
cultivate your habits. 

Self is merely a conventional designation given to the transitory 
dharmas that for the sake of convenience we call the body and the 
mind. There is no other self than those transitory dharmas. Those 
transitory dharmas, precisely by passing quickly into absence, show us 
the true nature of things. And by knowing the true nature of things, 
we let go of our cravings. Therefore, transitory dharmas are what 
enable us to awaken. So they can be given the poetic designation 
"Buddha nature".

No one knows any other person better than that person knows himself.
That is why the Buddha said "No one can liberate another. One can only
liberate oneself." 

Physical pain is unavoidable. But if one does not try to resist the pain
but instead simply accepts it as unavoidable, then the physical dukkha
is not compounded by a psychological sense of discontent or frustration.

Mahayana texts have long sections railing against Buddhists who eat meat
or dairy products or honey. Flesh is forbidden because it requires the
killing of an animal, thus violating the first precept. Dairy, eggs, and
honey are forbidden because they require stealing from sentient beings,
which violates the second precept. Onions and garlic are forbidden,
because 1) they supposedly increase sexual desire and other passions, 2)
they make one's breath smell foul and thus make it difficult to preach
Dharma effectively, 3) the principal life-force of the plant is in the
bulb, and taking the bulb therefore kills the plant. (Eating leafy
vegetables or fruits is acceptable, because one can eat them without
killing the whole plant. Eating carrots or tubers, of course, is
forbidden.) The general claim in these texts is that anyone who truly
aspires to be a bodhisattva will eat what we now call a vegan diet with
no strong-flavoured condiments. In my view, these vegetarian rants sow
the seeds of fanaticism. I am inclined to think that they were part of
the spiritual competitiveness with Brahmins. For quite a few centuries
Brahmins and Buddhists were involved in one-upsmanship, each trying to
take a higher moral road. Alcohol, of course, is banned by the fifth
precept and is generally avoided by precept-observing Buddhists.
Caffeine and tobacco were unknown in India at the time the precepts were
formed, but many Buddhists avoid them on the grounds that they are
addictive. 

The doctrine of anaatman became the hallmark of Buddhism in India. Any
Indian Buddhists who came up with anything that seemed a little too much
like an aatman were quickly reprimanded by other Indian Buddhists. The
result was that a very simple and straightforward idea (there is nothing
over which one has full mastery and control) became a metaphysical
obsession (nothing lasts for more than one moment). As Buddhists became
increasingly obsessed with denying that there can be a permanent
substance, they painted themselves into a doctrinal corner and ended up
taking positions that were quite indefensible and illogical. 

The Padhaana Sutta of the Sutta-nipaata lists the following as the
generals in the army of Mara (Death): 
1. Desire.
2. Dislike.
3. Hunger and Thirst.
4. Craving.
5. Laziness.
6. Fear.
7. Doubt.
8. Stubbornness.
9. Restlessness.
10. Striving for possessions, praise, glory and fame by illegitimate means.
11. Thinking highly of oneself.
12. Belittling others.
The army of the deathless (amara), nirvana, has but one general:
Mindfulness. 

When one is told that a buddha is by definition completely free of all
anger, the question I am most inclined to ask is: "So, has anyone
actually ever been a buddha?" Nothing that I have ever experienced would
lead me to think that a buddha has ever actually existed. But then that
does not matter to me in the least. The definition, the ideal of being a
buddha, is still the direction in which I have oriented my entire life.
Whether the ideal can be realised does not concern me in the least. It
is a myth that there have actually been people who realized the ideal.
To some of us it is a useful myth. To others it is not. Let those who
find it useful take it up. Let those who do not find it useful set it
aside and push on in their search for a more useful myth. It could very
well be that if you combed the entirety of human history, everyone who
has ever lived would fall into the category of People Who have Not
Attained Buddhahood. Would that make Buddhism any less useful to
humanity? What's wrong with saying that when we are angry, we have
thrown our buddhahood away for a moment? Buddhahood should be at a
distance. An impossible distance. Otherwise, we will not grow by
striving to reach it. A goal that can be attained is a very cheap ideal
indeed, a cheap toy rather than a useful tool. 

The goal of Buddhist practice is to have zero afflictions. I don't
believe for a moment that anyone has ever reached that state, nor do I
believe it is possible.

It's very difficult for me to speak accurately about my own past,
because it keeps changing every time I recollect it. Memory, I am
convinced, is the most creative thinking that any of us do. As I
remember my life today, I cannot recall a time when I ever took certain
teachings of Buddhism literally. I have for example, never taken rebirth
or karma as doctrines to be taken literally. I think there may have been
a time when I believed in nibbaana and arahants, but that was quite some
time ago.

My own position is that I have no way of knowing whether dukkha-nirodha
is possible or not. But even if I knew with certainty that it is not
possible, I would still work steadily at reducing the amount of dukkha I
experience, because I know for a fact that dukkha can be significantly
reduced. If it can be eliminated altogether, fine. If not, I shall not
be disappointed. 

In the absence of certainty, one has only conjectures.

When one's investigations have turned up conflicting reports as to what
the facts are, then one can only admit that one does not know what the
facts are. 

Don't ask questions about myths. They are not meant to be consistent.
They are the work of imagination, not of historiography or science. They
are meant to inspire and convey basic dogmas. If you don't find the
dogmas conveyed in Buddhist mythology delightful, then move on to some
other mythology, one that you do find inspiring. "Myth" has come to be
seen as synonymous as "untruth", and Truth has for most people come
to be the domain of nothing but "fact", which, sadly, most people fail
to realise is but another word for stories on which there is general
agreement among people hailed as authorities. 

Healthy sexuality. Is that not a contradiction in terms? Sexuality
itself is a disease. It often lead to horrible consequences, such as
birth, which inevitably leads to death. The chances of dying as a result
of being born are 100%, much worse than the chances of dying as a result
of smoking. And yet death could be prevented. It could be prevented if
people stopped being born. And that could happen if people would stop
having sex. So I would have to conclude that having sex is the greatest
cause of avoidable suffering in the history of life. 

If you derive benefit from your opinion, and I derive benefit from mine,
then the question of which opinion is true simply does not arise. For
that reason, I am content to find a Buddhist organisation that meets my
standards, and I have no interest in saying that other Buddhists are
illegitimate or false.

Buddhism has nothing to say at all about Fascism. Fascism was a
political philosophy based on centralised autocratic power with strongly
nationalistic sentiments. By extension it refers to any excessively
rigid form of centralised dictatorial control. The Buddha had quite a
bit to say about the duties of a king to see to it that everyone in the
kingdom had the means to earn an honest livelihood (with which the
Fascisti would heartily agree), but beyond that he did not have much of
anything to say about politics. In fact, he even accepted the patronage
of Ajatasattu, a brutal king who seized power by torturing his father to
death. The Buddha was an equal-opportunity beggar; he turned down
donations from no one, including wealthy prostitutes, and he refrained
from making righteous pronouncements of public figures. 

Not to be aware of one's own tendencies to project can lead to some
pretty unsatisfactory dealings with other people. It does little good to
point out to another person that he or she is projecting some internal
complex onto others; to discover that tendency in oneself, on the other
hand, is perhaps the most valuable insight that one can ever have. The
insight can lead one away from, not towards, a tendency to be
authoritarian and autocratic and excessively harsh in one's judgements
of others. 

Techno music is the most efficient vehicle for totalitarianism yet
devised. It numbs the sensitivities and the intellects of those who hear
it, turning them into complacent zombies, ripe to be taken over by an
autocratic ruler. This hideous noise now pervades every coffee shop in
Montreal, making it impossible to go to a bistro and have a good
conversation. That, of course is the whole purpose of the modern "music"
industry, to make intelligent conversation impossible, thereby making
informed dissent impossible. Read Orwell's 1984. It is all explained
there. 

I don't assume anything. I think rebirth is possible, although I have
never seen any evidence strong enough to convince me that it exists. I
try to live my life in such a way that the lives of those with whom I
interact will be as pleasant as is humanly possible. I reckon if I do
that, then I will die content. If there is an afterlife, it will take
care of itself. If not, then nothing will have been lost, for I will
have lived a happy and productive life. 

There is no actual past. The past as remembered is a fiction. Everyone
is the custodian of the past that he or she creates to make some sense
of the pains of the present. 

I have no interest in saying which Buddhists are legitimate and which
are false. If there are false Buddhists, they will probably not reap the
benefits that often come of practising genuine Buddhism. But life is
complex, and it is very difficult to say to what extent one's success in
being happy and making others happy is a direct consequence of one's
religious beliefs and practices. 

The Buddha said that pleasure is the condition out of which attachment is born. 

I think you'll find if you read carefully, and then practise what you
have read about, that there is no difference at all between Dharma and
indifference to life and death. 

I found that I really enjoyed the affection and the conversations before
and after sex so much that it finally occurred to me that I could
dispense with the sex and just have good affectionate conversations,
uninterrupted by side-aches and wheezing. 

The person named Gotama Buddha, even if he is a complete work of
fiction, is the person whose teachings Buddhists admire and try their
best to follow. Buddhists have confidence in those teachings not because
of who said them, but because people have applied the teachings and
found that they work. This is not to say that other teachings don't also
work to achieve different or similar results. It is only to say that the
teachings in the Pali canon, attributed to a perhaps fictitious
character named Gotama Buddha, do work and are the teachings that best
deserve to be given the label Buddhist. 

I adhere to what Buddhists call the four reliances. The first of those
reliances is that one should rely on teachings, rather than on the formal
credentials or the personalities of teachers. And the second reliance
is that one should rely on the meaning (artha) of a teaching and not
merely on the word (shabda). [more from the dalai lama :These four
reliances consist of advice to rely on the teaching, not on the person;
within the teachings rely on the meaning, not on mere words; rely on
definitive sutras, not those requiring interpretation; and rely on the
deeper understanding of wisdom, not on the knowledge of ordinary
awareness. This approach can be found in the Buddha's own words, as when
he said, 'O, Bhikshus and wise men, do not accept what I say just out of
respect for me, but first subject it to analysis and rigorous examination.']

In Indian mythology, this is the kali-yuga, the era of kali, named after
the name given to the unlucky throw of the dice that marks the thrower
as a loser. We live in the age of losers. It is a characteristic of the
kali-yuga that everything becomes a commodity. Everything is for sale.
Everything has a price. Everything becomes a potential source of
entertainment, nothing is sacred, and no one is spared a turn in the
laughing-stock. In the kali-yuga sex is nothing but a joke, and celibacy
is nothing but a joke; spirituality is a joke, religion is a joke,
morality is a joke and beauty is a joke, and so is secularism,
materialism, wantonness and ugliness. We are a people conquered by our
own frivolity, destroyed by our own shallowness, overpowered by own
fundamental lack of respect for ourselves or for anyone else. We have
become an angry race of tormented hell beings, incapable of doing
anything more creative than mocking one another, taunting one another,
blaming one another for our own stupidity and the misfortunes it
engenders. Does Buddhism have a place in the kali-yuga? Yes, of course.
It, too, can become a weapon by which we bludgeon one another into even
greater insensibility. Does it have a more positive and creative role
than this? I don't know. I can only cite the answer to this sort of
question often given by Krishnamurti: "Find out." 

Trusting people is a fool's game. 

Buddhism is an intrinsically lonely path, as is life. You are alone when
you're born, and you're alone when you die, and you're alone in most
crises between birth and death. Most of all, you're quite alone in the
privacy of your own particular conditioning and the dukkha that attends
it. Despite all that solitude, it can make a dramatic difference to be
(in Stephen Batchelor's memorable phrase) "alone with others". No one
that I have met is as aware of all his own shortcomings as others are.
We all have blind spots, thanks to elaborate defenses our egos have
built up to prevent ourselves from seeing those aspects of our mentality
the ego would rather not see. Others can be invaluable in helping you
see those blind spots, and giving you the courage to own them and then
deal with them. Even if you can't find a Buddhist community where you
are going, you might be able to find some friends with a sincere
interest in contemplative practice. They may use a different vocabulary
from the one you are most comfortable with, but they can still be very
valuable to you. Seek such people out. You're almost sure to find them,
almost anywhere you go. 

What I have found is that progress in the contemplative life is best
achieved when one's life is kept simple. And simplicity is best served
by living by the maxim "If something is not necessary, leave it out." 

To the best of my knowledge, the notion of the kali-yuga came about
because of dramatic social and demographic changes that swept India as a
result of waves of invasions by conquering foreigners. Due to these
demographic changes, social customs changed, religion changed, languages
changed. Those who clung to the old ways naturally saw all these changes
as threatening. One of the standard observations about the kali-yuga
(which was a Hindu idea, not a Buddhist idea) was that Buddhism had
become much more popular than Vedic sacrifice. Buddhism was quickly
adopted by those who came into India from outside as military
conquerors, and since they were in power and found Buddhism attractive,
they patronised Buddhist institutions and neglected Hindu institutions.
So while it's true that the notion of a kali-yuga was a subjective
reaction based on resistance to change, it is also important to realise
that the changes being experienced were quite dramatic and not the sort
of thing that anyone could easily ignore. 

If you have trained yourself to see the world as a place in which people
create their own lives, then everything you see with confirm that dogma.
But if you set that dogma aside and try to see the world in various
other ways, through the lens of other dogmas, you'll probably find that
they also make quite a bit of sense and that experience will seem to
confirm them. In the end, it is very difficult to be sure whether
fortune and misfortune is a consequence of people engineering their own
destinies or a consequence of a complex of essentially impersonal causal
factors over which no one has any control at all. 

The practice I have found most effective and transformative over the
years is mettaa-bhaavanaa, the cultivation of loving kindness. I used to
do it every day but now do it only about once a week. It has had a
dramatic effect on my own personal happiness and has made it much easier
for me to deal with other people in daily life. Because I am a deeply
introverted and very shy person, dealing with others was always quite
difficult for me when I was younger. I was so timid that I just
automatically agreed with everyone. But over the years this practice of
loving-kindness has made it possible for me to be much less shy, and
much less prone to seeing agreement with others as the only way of being
compassionate towards them. 

Is there an inhuman side of Buddhism? If so, I have not yet seen it.
Offhand, I would think that if you find inhumanity, it is more because
of a failure of someone to grasp the principles of Buddhism than a sign
that Buddhism itself promotes inhumanity. 

The four brahma-vihaaras (divine abodes) are: 
1.metta, which literally means friendship.
2.karuna, which literally means compassion, acting to alleviate suffering.
3.mudita, joy, often translated as sympathetic joy.
4.upekkha, impartiality, equanimity.

Since none of us has the faintest idea what the truth is, let's stop
fighting with each other over it.

There is no such thing as Sanskrit lettering. Sanskrit may be written in
any of the Indian alphabets, or in the Latin alphabet, or in Tibetan
letters.

The Dhamma to which one goes for refuge is Nibbaana (nirvana), defined
as the eradication of all afflictions, and especially the ten
afflictions of greed, hatred, delusion, pride, views, hesitation, sloth,
anxiety, shamelessness and immodesty. Secondarily, Dhamma refers to the
quality (dhamma) that is most necessary to attain nirvana, namely, the
quality of wisdom. Thirdly, Dhamma refers to any body of literature
(including oral teachings) that promote wisdom and impart it to others.
Dhamma can therefore refer to the literature of any school of philosophy
or any religion that promotes wisdom and the resultant eradication of
afflictions. Fourthly, as a member of the category of Dhamma as
expressed in the paragraph above, Dhamma refers specifically to the
Sad-dhamma or Buddha-dhamma that is preserved in the vinaya, the suttas
and the technical treatises known as abhidhamma.

The very idea that some religious organisations are dangerous is
precisely what turns them into dangerous organisations. If left alone,
if not constantly hounded by outsiders who consider them dangerous, very
few religious communities would become what are popularly and
derogatorily known as cults. To label an organisation as a cult tends to
be a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

At one time, I was trying to understand and make sense of the
Buddha-dharma so that I might deepen my practice. As my practice
deepened, however, I found that understanding began to fall away and
become unnecessary. Now I promote the practice, but place less and less
emphasis on the theoretical structure built on outmoded cultural
assumptions that prevailed in India 2500 years ago. 

One time a claim was made that some monks had reformed the Buddha's
program (buddha-saasanaa). In response to this claim, this advice was
given. "If someone claims to have reformed the Buddha's program, you
should ask whether they have rejected any of the four noble truths or
added a fifth truth to them. You should then ask whether or not they
advocate cultivating the thirty-seven factors of awakening. You should
then ask whether they advocate killing, stealing, fornicating, lying and
being intoxicated. If the affirm the four noble truths, recommend
cultivating the factors of awakening and advocate living by the
precepts, they have not reformed the Buddha's program at all." 

When it becomes apparent to me that trust in me has broken down in
someone, or that my ability to trust another has broken down, and when
it is pretty clear that trust cannot be restored, I withdraw from the
discussion. 

The "Fat Guy standing with a bag over his back" is a statue of a Chinese
monk who used to wander around the countryside giving toys and candies
to children. He became popular in East Asia as a kind of equivalent of a
Santa Claus figure. Later Buddhist tradition identified the good-natured
fat monk as the future Buddha, Maitreya. So in the popular mind, the
jolly fat guy is Maitreya, who is up in Tushita heaven, waiting to come
to earth as the next Buddha. 

Mettaa-Bhaavanaa is the generation (bhaavanaa) of loving-kindness
(mettaa). In some traditions the practice begins by generating
acceptance and other positive feelings towards oneself, then towards a
dear friend, then towards a stranger and then towards an enemy, and
finally towards all sentient beings in all six directions. In other
traditions, one begins by thinking that all beings have at some time in
history been one's own mother and then going from there. Beginning with
oneself is useful for people who have sufficient self-esteem (which is
certainly not everyone). Beginning with the thoughts of motherhood works
well for people who buy Mother's Day cards every year. 

Just for the record, I do not for a moment think that ANY scripture
within Buddhism is cleaner or purer or more accurate than any other. I
also don't think it makes the least bit of difference which scriptures
come closer to the teachings of the actual Buddha. Even if we had him on
videotape, I would still question everything he said and would not let
him get away with any bullshit. My preference for the Theravada canon as
a rule has nothing to do with my assumption that it is closer to the
teachings of the Buddha himself. That's irrelevant. My preference for
the Pali canon is that it has, on the whole, less bullshit in it. I find
its teachings very direct and to the point. I also find that those
teachings, if practised, lead very rapidly to positive results. 

My favourite real-life mantra story is of a woman who asked me once if I
could give her a mantra to curb her anger. I told her I don't believe in
mantras, so I'm the wrong one to ask, but I told her she might go see a
Korean Zen master. She did. The next time I saw her, she was beaming
with smiles. She said the Zen master had given her a wonderfully
effective mantra. She said it every time she felt angry, and the anger
disappeared immediately. I asked her what the mantra was. She repeated
it me. I managed not to laugh or even crack a smile when she solemnly
recited the Korean words for "One, Two, Three, Four, Five." 

Ajahn Chah used to ask his disciples "Are you feeling dukkha?" If they
responded that they were, he told them to continue with their practice.
It's really as simple as that. Dukkha gives one all the urgency one
needs to find a way of eliminating it, seeing to it that it has no more
rebirth. 

Buddhists are trying to get rid of dukkha (frustration, discontent).
That is something that can be done in this very life. It makes little
difference what happens after the death of the physical body. The Buddha
said not to worry about such questions.

Most of the suttas in the first division of the Diigha-nikaaya [prohibit
the chanting of mantras]. Also in the vinaya there is a rule against
chanting, which is usually understood as a prohibition against intoning
mantras. Mantras, of course, were the heart of the Vedic sacrifice.
Those who rejected the sacrificial religion also rejected the intoning
of mantras and other such rituals. But habits die hard. Within a few
centuries Buddhists were as hopelessly addicted to mantras as everyone
else in India. The Vedic mentality eventually conquered the Buddhists. 

The cessation of afflictions (kilesa-nirodha) is not regarded as a thing
in itself. Cessation is not a thing that exists; rather it is a name
given to the fact that things no longer arise. Because it is not a thing
in itself, it is said not to be conditioned. As Naagasena says in the
Questions of Milinda, the cessation of sorrow can produce a great deal
of bliss or joy. The example he uses is a man who climbs out of a pit of
burning embers feels happy to be out of contact with what was once
causing him pain. This is what nirvana is; it is the cessation of things
that once caused dukkha. About that cessation one can feel joy, or one
can feel equanimity. Therefore, nirvana is not intrinsically joyous or
equanimous. How one feels when it is achieved varies. 

There is nothing wrong with saying mantras as such, just as there is
nothing wrong with healing people. But when one exchanges the service of
saying mantras or healing for livelihood, then one is misusing them.
Mantras are quite dangerous, I think, because it is very easy to slip
into the mentality that sees them as a commodity that can be bought and
sold and become part of one's livelihood. I can also imagine that
convincing people that they need to be empowered by an initiation before
the mantras become truly efficacious would be seen as a form of wrong
livelihood, for it is a way of inviting the practitioner to support the
giver of the initiation. This is remarkably close to the kind of
brahmanism that the Buddha unambiguously criticized. But I don't mean to
single out mantras and initiations. An awful lot, perhaps most, of what
Buddhist monks and priests do to earn their daana falls squarely in the
category of things that the Buddha said that he and his disciples never
do. Wrong livelihood is alive and well in the bhikkhu-sangha and has
been for very long time. 

Mantras: I am quite familiar with those practises. I do them myself. I
am just saying that the Buddha did not teach such things and that in
fact he condemned the reciting of mantras. But so what? Most of us who
call ourselves Buddhists do many things that the Buddha recommended
against doing. That is, perhaps, why some of us still experience a bit
of dukkha from time to time. Of course, if one thinks about mantras as
Asanga did, then there is not much of a problem. He saw them as a device
for maintaining concentration and mindfulness. He saw them as empty
phrases having no inherent meaning or efficacy; reciting them is doing a
completely meaningless act, and it thereby helps one be mindful of the
inherent meaninglessness of all activities. If you see mantras in that
light, then there is no problem in reciting them. I would strongly
prefer singing a song or listening to a bit of music. Then one has less
delusion about the nature of what one is doing. If one recites a mantra
to get out of an unpleasant mental state, then one may get the false
impression that there is something spiritual about getting over feeling
a bit down. The technique for getting over an unpleasant mental state
that I find most useful is just to study that mental state very
thoroughly. If it is unpleasant, study its unpleasantness with the
greatest of care. Then the mental state will go away, and you will not
be tempted to invite it back into your mentality. By really studying a
bad mood, I find I can banish it for a very long time. Getting out of it
by some other method (songs or mantras), I find, is a bit like putting
wallpaper over a crack in the wall. It hides the damage but does nothing
at all to repair it. Any time one does anything for the sake of gaining
comfort, then it is worldly. There is nothing less worldly about getting
our of a blue funk by performing a puja or reciting a mantra than there
is by singing a song or taking Prozac or getting laid. When the goal is
simply to gain temporary relief from an unpleasant state, then it is a
worldly goal. 

Which body do you wish to keep? Do you wish to keep your body as it was
at the moment of conception? Or the body as it was when it came from
your mother's womb? Or your body as it was when you were a teenager
covered with pimples? Or you body as it was when you were in the prime
of youth? Or your body when it becomes afflicted with arthritis? Or the
body as it was at the moment of death? (What if you die of multiple
sclerosis, or cancer, or by burning to death? Is that the body you would
like to keep?) The fact is, your body changes every day. Every time you
eat, sweat, shit, urinate, ejaculate or blow your nose, you lose part of
your body. Do you studiously avoid all these activities, for fear of
losing your body? The standard Buddhist belief is that if it's a body
you want, it's a body you'll get after you die. You'll shed the old
cancer-ridden carcass and start over again as a fertilized egg. And
you'll keep doing that until you finally get tired of having a body and
a mind. Then, if you learn to drop attachments to bodily and mental
processes, you'll achieve nirvana (bhava-nirodha). 

Narcotics and alcohol are among the favoured ways of extinguishing
consciousness. Others prefer Zen. The effect is much the same. 

I have no problem with pleasure. I enjoy it from time to time myself.
What I have learned over the years, however, is that many things that
seem pleasurable at first become tedious with time. One gets used to
them and seeks other kinds of pleasure until one is so thoroughly
addicted that one wishes to keep the body for eternity. As I have said,
if you wish to go from one body to another for eternity, you can do so.
If you find eventually that it is no longer satisfying to keep seeking
one physical pleasure after another, and seeking one intellectual thrill
after another, and going from emotional peaks to the slough of despond,
remember us Buddhists. We might be able to help you out. 

It is very easy to understand that the only way to eliminate
disappointment (dukkha) is to eliminate unrealistic desires. It is less
easy to face the fact that unrealistic desires really do have to be
given up if one wishes to attain freedom from disappointment. Most of
us, I think, try to strike some sort of bargain with reality. It takes
some time before one is prepared to recognize that reality is
uncompromising. 

If you want a general guideline that covers all situations, it is simply
this: Engage in no sexual practice that harms oneself or another person.
So what is harmful? The only way to figure out what is harmful is to
think about your experiences and those of people you know. Reflection of
your own is a far better guide to the precepts than the often outmoded
advice of old commentators. 

About fifteen years ago I was a member of the board of directors of a
Zen temple that was located in a part of town where prostitution was
very much in evidence. Some members of the temple said they thought the
presence of prostitutes in the neighbourhood was detracting from the
quality of the neighbourhood and suggested that the temple should take
some action to clean the situation up. The Zen master listened to the
proposal and then said "What do you think? Would these prostitutes
pursue this line of work if they could make a reasonable livelihood in
some other way? And would the people who employ them pay money for sex
if they could find it in some other way?" Everyone agreed that the
answer to both questions was probably No. So the Zen master said "So
these prostitutes are in a position where they really have little choice
but to sell sex for a livelihood, and their customers are in a position
where they desire sex but cannot get it without paying money. If we are
fortunate enough that we do not have to sell sex or buy it, I don't
think we're in a position to pass judgement on either the prostitutes or
the people who hire them, do you?" We then passed on to more pressing
business. 

Dependent Origination : Things come into being when their conditions are
present and cease to be when their conditions become absent. Another
term for dependent origination is emptiness.

It is pretty useless to think in terms of absolutes. Thinking of
absolutes does not carry the ball to the goal line. 

A view is a position held for a specific reason. If one wishes to die in
order to escape the effects of one's bad karma, then one is likely to
believe that there is no life after death. That is known as the
Cessationist view (uccheda-vaada). If one wishes to live forever because
of a fear of extinction, then one is likely to believe in some form of
the view that awareness lasts forever. That is known as the Eternalist
view. If one neither fears extinction nor seeks it, then one no longer
has views. Even if one believes that awareness does eventually come to
an end (for example, in nirvana), that is not considered a view, because
it is not attended by a desire that things be a certain way. It is only
if one were to feel disappointment on learning that an hypothesis is
false that the hypothesis is classed as a view; it is then an
attachment. And more particularly, it is when the hypothesis to which
one is attached is an hypothesis that is used to rationalize one's
conduct in the world (such as rationalizing abusive behaviour on the
grounds that it makes no difference how one acts in this life, since
death obliterates the good and the evil alike, without discrimination)
that it is called wrong view (mithyaa d.r.s.ti). 

Hypocrisy means pretending to be what one is not, especially pretending
to have virtues that one does not in fact have. Not so many people are
hypocrites. Most people are quite aware of their own failings and do not
pretend to be free of them. Nor are that many people really ignorant (in
the Buddhist sense of the term). They know what they ought to do. They
just don't do it. That is not ignorance, nor is it hypocrisy. The Greeks
called it akrasia (impotence, weakness of will). I find it quite a
useful idea, since it covers the majority of people who have moral
failings and yet are neither ignorant of virtue nor hypocritical. They
are simply akratic. 

A Buddhist friend once said to me: "When you feel like praying, just pray.
You can work out the theology later." I found that very helpful. Prayer
is a way of speaking to oneself. It may be a way of getting in touch
with the best of oneself, which may or may not be called God, and which
may or may not come from the outside. Does it matter? Since that remark
from a good friend, I have never choked on the word "God", nor has it
seemed at all important to me to keep reminding myself and others that
as a Buddhist I don't really believe in God. 

If your goal is to live harmoniously with others, then it makes good
sense to take their prejudices into account. Failing to do so is sure to
result in experiencing unnecessary dukkha. Of course, one may strive to
help educate people so that they are less prejudiced, but this task is
more likely to succeed if one first gives every appearance of living
according to their ideas of what is acceptable and what is not. 

It may be noble to show little concern for one's own reputation, but it
is cavalier to pay no heed to the reputations of others. 

Beings need compassion precisely because they have no enduring self and
yet wish they did have an enduring self. Although there is no aspect of
experience that endures, part of the experience of most beings is that
they wish they could endure, and wish they could be in control of their
destinies. Because they cannot endure and cannot be in control of their
destinies, they experience disappointment. Compassion takes the form of
helping them better grasp reality so that their disappointment will
decrease. 

Emptiness is not an absolute term. Beings are not empty of absolutely
everything. Rather, they are empty of self. They have no nature all by
themselves, because they are dependent on conditions over which they
have no control. Because they wish they did have control but in fact
lack it, they experience disappointment. Therefore, they need compassion
in the form of helping them better grasp the true nature of things. 

It's true that "compassion" means to suffer with. But "KARUNA" comes
from the verb "KAROTI" (to do) and means to take action for someone.
When another being is experiencing affliction, then the appropriate
response is to act to remove the cause of the affliction. KARUNA, then,
is not so much a matter of suffering with as a matter of providing
relief from suffering. It is not compassion but pro-action. 

Concentration is focussing the mind on a single topic. In Pali it is
called ekaggataa (literally, single-pointedness). When
single-pointedness occurs in a healthy mind (kusala-citta), it is called
samaadhi. 

Mindfulness is a translation of the Pali term sati, which literally
means recollection. Specifically, it is recollecting the dhamma in
everything one does. Simply being aware of one's mental and physical
states is not mindfulness, but recollecting how one's mental and
physical states fit within the framework of Buddhist doctrine is
mindfulness. Specifically, when one is aware of the arising of physical
and mental states, then one is counteracting the extreme view of saying
that nothing exists (sabbam natthi). When one attends to the passing
away of physical and mental states, then one is counteracting the
extreme view that everything exists (sabbam atthi). Avoiding these two
forms of wrong view is remembering (sati) the middle path. And
remembering the middle path is remembering the dhamma. 

Buddhism is all about reducing (and eventually eliminating) mental and
emotional discomfort. And since no one can ever know for sure to what
extent another person is in psychological pain, or whether over a course
of time that person's pain is generally waxing or waning or simply
oscillating, it follows that no one can ever know for sure how well
another person is understanding and practising Buddhism. 

Why not simply forget all labels? For the time being, I seem to have
lost all interest in wearing them. I have no more interest in wearing a
Catholic label than I had when you made your kind offer a while back to
put the Brahmanical, Jaina, Hinduist, Marxist, materialist, Pragmatist,
or Stoic labels on me. The Buddhist label does not interest me much
either, I must say. I sometimes refer to myself as a Buddhist simply to
give credit where credit is due; I got to where I am now by thinking
about Buddhism more than anything else. Perhaps one could say that it
was by misunderstanding Buddhism that I got to where I am now. So be it.
Since it was Buddhism I misunderstood, I think it is only fair to say
that, to that extent at least, I am somewhat more of a Buddhist than
anything else. 

Dhammas have the mark of dukkha only to one who longs for them to have
the marks of permanence and self. But when dharmas are viewed without
false expectations, as impermanent and impersonal, they have no capacity
to deliver dukkha. 

I have found that my satisfaction with life tends to increase as my
material needs decrease. It also tends to increase in proportion to my
willingness to admit that I have a capacity to enjoy beauty. To someone
from my rather austere background, it was not easy to admit that joy is
simply a passing positive mental state that can be fully experienced
without attachment, rather than a distraction or a sign of inherent
spiritual depravity. I am happy to have made room for joy in my life,
and one of the principal ways I now do it is to attend mass in some of
the exquisite churches in my city. Another way is to spend time in the
company of deeply good people who gather together for silent worship,
hence my fondness for Quaker meetings of worship. 

No doubt one of the most often used strategies of marginalizing another
culture or trivializing a rival religious tradition is to deny its
differences from one's own. Teaching that all roads lead to the top of
the mountain assumes that there is only one mountain top to go to. The
accompanying, usually unspoken assumption, is that one's own road is the
swiftest and most direct and that other roads might just as well be
abandoned. Stating that all roads lead to the top of the mountain is
often another way of saying "Since all religions have the same goal, and
since my religion is a more efficient way of getting to that goal than
your current religion, you would surely be better off following my
religion than yours." 

On a personal level, I tend to be very resistant to any kind of monism
or non-dualism. I am a robust pluralist. That means that I believe that
many religions have very different goals from other religions. Not only
do I acknowledge difference, I celebrate it. The goal of Christianity is
not at all the same as the goal of Judaism or Islam, and none of those
religions has the same goal as Buddhism. That notwithstanding, there are
numerous important points of congruence. Similarly, the goal of
psychoanalysis is not at all the same as the goal of Buddhism, and the
goal of quantum mechanics is not at all the same as the goal of
Buddhism, but one might find a few points of convergence between
Buddhism and either psychoanalytic theory and between Buddhism and
quantum mechanics. On a practical level, I practice several religions,
because I do not find that any single tradition gives me everything that
I seek in life. I attend Roman Catholic or Anglican mass almost every
Sunday, and often follow that by going to a Quaker meeting of silent
worship. I am not in any sense of the word a Christian, and I find the
basic teachings of Christianity somewhat unappealing, but I love the
atmosphere of a high mass, and I also love entering into the living
silence of a Quaker meeting. Most of all, I love being among people who
are seeking to cultivate the higher aspects of their being. During the
week, I practice yoga and several different forms of Buddhist
meditation. I find them all helpful. If I did not find them useful, I
would not do them. If they all had the same results and same goals, I
would probably find that doing only one of them was sufficient to my
needs. Because I have a variety of goals, and a variety of sides to my
character, I celebrate the varieties of religious doctrine and practice
and feel no need to choose one to the exclusion of the others.
Especially I feel no need to reduce them all to a single principle or
single set of ideals. I am madly in love with the world and with life.
It is impossible to love without celebrating the radical otherness of
one's beloved. If I loved the world (or some particular person in the
world) only as my self, I would merely be a narcissist. It would be a
cramped and claustrophobic sort of self-love. That is not at all what I
seek. Therefore, I love the world as other than my self, as strangely
and mysteriously irreducible to my own desires. I love it for defying me
and thwarting me and even at times mocking me. I love it dualistically,
pluralistically. Non-dualism is to me anathema, for it always feels to
me like a barren doctrine for icy souls incapable of love, unwilling to
experience life in its fullness. 

I have never seen any Buddhist text anywhere saying that unhappiness in
inherent in phenomenal existence. What I have seen is that if one clings
to phenomenal existence, then dukkha is likely to ensue. But if one can
face phenomenal existence without clinging, then dukkha will not ensue.
In other words, it is not inherent in experience, but an accidental and
therefore avoidable feature of experience. 

As soon as a practitioner really begins to gain insight into Dharma, the
majority of mere believers will accuse him of having lost his faith.
Sadhya, your faith is monumental. May it eventually blossom into
insight. Meanwhile, leave heresy to the Christians and Jews. Heresy is
their concept, and it really has no place in Buddhism. Accusing someone
of misunderstanding (micchaa-di.t.t.hi) is quite different from accusing
someone of heresy. The concept of heresy refers to creating rifts and
sects within the community and is usually seen as an offence against God.
Saying that someone has a wrong view, on the other hand, simply implies
that they have misunderstood something that will impede their progress
in some way. It is not at all considered a sin.The distinction is subtle
but quite important.

From what I see here, the most common manifestation of "insight" is to
show contempt for other people, their views and their practices. Such
insight seems (to my admittedly fallible eye) rather shallow and
impoverished. Still, it may be a start. As soon as the practitioner can
leave off the practice of feeling and expressing contempt for others,
the germ of insight might just grow into something magnificent to
behold. 

Pseudo-psychoanalytic subterfuge is the preferred form of ad hominem
argumentation of our age. 

I have no idea how suicide would affect your soul, but I know it is
likely to wreak havoc on your body. And just in case your body is all
you have left, I would not advise treating it badly. Much depends, of
course, on what condition your body is in. If your reason for
contemplating suicide is that your body is already in very bad condition
and is barely able to sustain life, and if it is in greater pain than
you can possible endure, then suicide may be an option that gives you
some at least the feeling that you have some degree of control over your
destiny. There is no way of being certain what damage suicide might do
to your soul; there is no way of being certain that there is a soul to
damage. Much depends on how willing you are to take risks. About thirty
years ago I went through a phase of thinking very seriously about
suicide. What prevented me from doing the deed then was a kind of
stubbornness, a refusal to allow myself to be defeated by my own dark
moods. So I kept saying that I would wait until the dark mood passed. I
didn't want my last moments to be unpleasant ones. The dark moods always
passed. Who knows why? They just did. Eventually they got tired of
pestering me and just stopped coming around at all. I haven't drawn an
unhappy breath for twenty years or so. This is something that I never
used to dream it would ever be possible for me to say. Who knows? Maybe
thirty years from now you'll be telling someone that you haven't drawn
an unhappy breathe for several decades. I hope so. Meanwhile, I wish you
the very best of success in thinking and feeling your way through this
important issue. It may well be the most important issue you have ever
thought about. So take your time. 

Enjoy the stories if you are able. Believe them if it helps you in some
way. Dismiss them as superstition if so doing gives you greater comfort
and hastens you along the path. As an historical point, these claims of
what the Buddha was capable of doing were not considered supernatural at
the time of the Buddha. You'll find if you read the Pali canon that many
yogis, and not only the Buddha, are portrayed as having exactly these
powers, which were considered to be natural to anyone who practised
yoga. You'll also find descriptions very much like this in the Yoga
system of Patanjali. To claim such powers was in no way tantamount to
claiming to be a god, nor was it claiming to be in any way in touch with
or empowered by gods. 

Nothing rattles so loudly as an empty cart.

It has always seemed to me that a person can be quite serious about
saying something one day and equally serious about saying the opposite
on another day. Anyone who is intellectually and emotionally alive is
bound to be capable fo seeing things from many different and even
mutually exclusive perspectives. 

Taking an honest look at one's own body and mentality is a good way to
be aware of dukkha and its causes. Once one is aware of that, the rest
is very simple. Just stop feeding the monster. 

It is enough to know that things fall apart and that awareness itself is
always changing. It is enough to know that there is nowhere to stand in
the vast universe, nowhere you can call home. Then relax into that
radical homelessness. You'll be quite okay. 

Dharma is said to be a medicine. If you feel sick, take it and see if it
helps. Dharma is also said to be a path. If you feel you need to be
somewhere else, then take it and see if it gets you anywhere. 

When I find myself becoming complacent, then I find it helpful to focus
a bit on my shortcomings and to think in terms of having the goal of
improving my mentality a little. When I find I have pushed myself too
hard, I find it useful to stop and reflect on already being where I
thought I had to be. Both teachings are helpful, each in its own season.
Neither is helpful if it is taken as the only truth. It's good to learn
to be inconsistent in what you teach yourself. Consistency, I think you
may find, will land you in a real mess. It makes you rigid, dull and
alienated from life. And that is dukkha. 

I have never understood why some people apparently need to turn pretty
good people (such as the Buddha) into superhuman people. But one cannot
deny that some people do seem to have this need, and I cannot see that
it does any real harm to them to believe that the Buddha could fly, read
minds, walk on water and issue sandalwood farts. I recently read a
biography of a 19th century lama that was filled to overflowing with all
kinds of semi-miraculous stories. It was reported that the lama had read
the entire vinaya and all its commentaries (13 volumes) in a single
sitting, memorized the entire perfection of wisdom literature (several
thousand pages) in the time it took him to drink a pot of tea, turned a
mountain to dust by throwing a dumpling at it, and brought several
people back from the dead. It was great good fun, sort of like my
favourite childhood stories about Paul Bunyan. 

What do you do when you discover that anything is causing you trouble
and pain? You just stop it, right? So if the desire to be rid of dukkha
is causing you dukkha, then just stop trying to get rid of dukkha. Just
relax into it. You'll be fine. 

If your practice requires effort, you are not practising right. It takes
no effort to drop something that is tormenting you. And that's all you
need to do in Buddhist practice. If it hurts, stop it. 

Most meditaters I know are samadhi junkies. They use meditation like a
narcotic. They think it is a panacea. It probably doesn't hurt them all
that much, but it sure as hell doesn't do them much good. It certainly
does not do them as much good as just letting go of their turmoil would
do. 

There are no wrong turns. All roads eventually lead to Albuquerque. Some
just take a bit more time, which gives you all that much more time to
enjoy the scenery. Bon voyage, mon ami. 

The word "fundamentalist" has many connotations. It often means holding
the view that a canonical body of scriptures contains the whole truth
but only when interpreted literally, without metaphorical, allegorical
or heuristic overtones. As would be expected, some Buddhists are more
literalistic than others about such issues as rebirth, the existences of
paradise realms and hells, and the supernormal powers of yogis. Some are
so literalistic and canon-bound as to be very close in mentality to
Christian, Islamic or Hindu Fundamentalists. (One finds this kind of
literalism especially among some Western Buddhists, who are probably
somewhat insecure about their own conversions to Buddhism and need to
berate any interpretation of scripture that threatens them.)
Fundamentalism also suggests a strong stance against humanism,
secularism and scientific skepticism. Many self-proclaimed
fundamentalists are, in effect, at war with modernity and see the modern
world as an evil realm that must either be reformed or destroyed
altogether. Very few Buddhists that I know of take such a view as this.
I can't think of any who feel driven to take control of the educational
system, form lobbies to influence politicians and so forth. Perhaps
there are Buddhists with such aspirations, but they are probably just
smart enough to realize that they are significantly outnumbered. (Only
one American in 500 is a Buddhist, and only one Buddhist in 500 is a
fundamentalist. So we're talking a really tiny minority group here. You
could probably fit all of them into a Volkswagen van.) 

I have never heard of any Buddhist who had any difficulty with the
theory of evolution. Perhaps this is because Buddhism does not
incorporate any dogmas about creation. Indeed, the Buddha warned his
disciples not to let themselves get involved in such irrelevant
questions as how, when or even whether the world had a beginning. 

Although most Buddhists claim to feel well disposed towards scientific
method, some Western Buddhists in fact harbour essentially irrational
suspicions towards the findings of science, especially when those
findings weigh against traditional Buddhist dogmas. Probably the issue
in which this is most felt is in the area of whether rebirth (as
traditionally understood by some Buddhists) is possible, given what we
now know of the central nervous system. About this issue you can find
views held with a level of conviction that borders on the obsessional. 

The usual Buddhist attitude concerning sexuality is that if one wishes
to avoid pain and conflict, then it is not a bad idea to go along with
prevailing social values. Therefore when Buddhism is found in deeply
homophobic cultures (such as Tibet and Myanmar), it tends to be strongly
homophobic. Japanese culture is much more open to homosexuality (and
sexuality in general), so Japanese Buddhists tend not to get too worked
up over adultery, homosexuality and other forms of sexual expression.
Western Buddhists, predictably, run the whole gamut of Western culture.
In America, which is arguably the most sexually confused civilization on
earth, Buddhist attitudes towards sexuality are hopelessly complex.
American Zen master Robert Aitken has observed that for most Americans
sexuality is by far the biggest set of personal conflicts they have to
deal with. So don't expect much uniformity of view among American
Buddhists on issues of sexuality. On one end of the scale you can find
people who fully accept homosexuality as a valid form of sexual
expression; on the other end, you can find Buddhists who will tell you
that homosexuality will surely result in rebirth in hell. 

I have never suggested that there is no rebirth. I have merely said that
there is controversy among Buddhists over the issue and that the issue
does not matter at all to the practice of Buddhism. This in no way
nullifies the whole purpose of the Buddha's teaching. The Buddha said
repeatedly that his teaching was about disappointment (dukkha), the
cause of disappointment (dukkha-samudaya), the cessation of
disappointment (dukkha-nirodha) and the path leading to the cessation of
disappointment (dukkha-nirodha-gamini-pratipad). 

The Buddha himself said that he could not know what a person's mentality
was like unless he spent several months with them in person, observing
their actions and hearing their voice. In the absence of certainty on
these matters, there is nothing much to be lost by assuming the best in
people rather than the worst. Give it a try. You might find it makes
life feel more comfortable if you don't assume that everyone around you
is filled with anger, rage, suspicion and ulterior motives. 

Sri Lankan and Burmese Buddhism were both heavily influenced by Mahayana
and possibly even by tantra during the early part of the recently ended
millennium. This is well documented. Some Thai Buddhists like to play up
the Brahmanical influences on Sri Lankan and Burmese Buddhism so that
they can represent Thai Buddhism as the only "pure" Theravada, hence the
only pure "Hinduism-free" Buddhism. Of course in Thailand Brahmanism is
still alive and well, every bit as much as in Lanka or Myanmar, so I
think all claims to "purity" are pretty ridiculous and show more of an
obsessively sectarian nature than signs of impartial scholarship, real
insight or (dare I say it?) awakening. 

As you no doubt know, Asanga defended the practice of reciting mantras
precisely on the grounds that mantras are meaningless and
non-efficacious. Therefore, if one recites them, then one can learn to
do an action without attachment to expectations of results. Since
mantras appear to be words but are in fact meaningless, reciting mantras
is a way by which one can gain insight into the fact that ultimately all
words and phrases are meaningless. This makes good sense to me. It is
why I have no trouble endorsing mantra practice for some people, even
though I myself never do it. 

There is more to Fundamentalism (used as a descriptive term, not as a
term of contempt) than just returning to sources. Fundamentalism usually
involves an insistence that a particular body of scriptures is the ONLY
source of true teaching for the religion in question. So it is not just
the return to scriptures that makes one a fundamentalist, but rather the
deprecation of all that lies outside the chosen canon. 

It is interesting to note that the late Venerable Buddhadasa also argued
that the doctrine of rebirth was not only a non-Buddhist doctrine but an
anti-Buddhist doctrine in that it runs contrary to the very idea of
dependent origination and no-self. 

Surely you are smart enough not to keep committing the genetic fallacy,
namely, the view that the origin of an idea determines whether it is
true or false. The Buddha did not advise people to regard something as
true merely because it was stated by someone expert in the tipi.taka. He
advised people to see as Dharma anything that conduces to solitude,
independence, liberation from passions, etc. So if someone finds a
"Hindu" or "Gnostic" or "shamanistic" notion or practice conducive to
solitude and liberation, then it is Dharma every bit as much as
something that happens by some fluke to have been preserved in a canon
as the word of the Buddha. 

Fear is one of the principal traits of the mentality of any
Fundamentalist. Fundamentalists protect themselves from fear by drawing
imaginary magical circles around themselves and saying "Inside the
circle everything is safe and acceptable, but outside the circle
everything is dangerous and threatening." 

It is precisely because I myself am stubborn, mean-spirited, opinionated
and uncharitable that I can spot those tendencies immediately in others.
But as we both know very well, no one has a svabhaava. None of us has a
fixed self. And because I have no self, my character is sometimes
stubborn and uncharitable, at other times quite generous. At times I am
filled with love, at other times overflowing with murderous hatred. That
is how anyone who is not enlightened is. We are all mercurial and
unpredictable until we have been "fixed" by a combination of insight and
many decades of painstaking cultivation. 

Usually scholars use the term "Brahmanism" to refer to the early Vedic
religion with its commentaries. They use the term "Hinduism" to describe
the much later religion based mostly on the Puranas, which tends to have
a different cast of characters from the Vedas. So it would be more
accurate to say that The Hindu religion grew out of Brahmanism under the
influence of Buddhism and Jainism. 

The concept of sin does not really arise in Buddhism. It is a
Judaeo-Christian concept that refers to wilful disobedience to the
commandments of God. Precepts in Buddhism are not commandments. They are
merely observations about what causes pain. The general principle is
that taking the lives of other living beings involves acting against
their wishes and therefore does violence to them. Also, depriving other
living beings of their freedom of movement by putting them into pens and
cages does violence to them. If your goal is to avoid doing violence to
others, then you will naturally not be much in favour of killing animals
or confining them in corrals and pens.The desire to avoid doing violence
to others is one that tends to grow rather slowly. It may begin with a
desire to avoid actually wringing the neck or cutting off the head of an
animal. It may then progress to not wanting to pay others to do those
acts. Eventually it may lead to not wanting to participate in any way in
a system that results in the continued taking of animal life for any
reason, whether for entertainment or for food or clothing. There is no
need to be absolute in these matters. What is better is to reflect on
your actions and the direct and indirect harm your actions may cause,
and then to reflect on how willing you are to allow this harm to
continue. Reflecting on the consequences of your actions is precisely
what the Buddha recommended to those who wish to minimise the amount of
suffering in the world. 

It is a matter of common experience that many people believe they are
awakened when in fact they are not. It may be possible for a person to
be quite calm, fearless, generous, compassionate and well behaved for a
very long time and to think that all this good conduct is a sign of
awakening. But then a crisis arises and the person falls apart and
reverts to old negative habits that had been dormant but not completely
uprooted. How embarrassing! So it is probably better never to assume
that you have "made the grade". Better to assume that your afflictions
are just in remission, rather than completely cured. Then you'll keep on
guard, thereby reducing the chances of being taken by surprise by a
sudden fall from grace. That, in any case, is what I would advise, if
only because I have fallen from dizzying spiritual heights so many times
during my life!

'Spiritual' is a triumphalist term coined by the early Christians to
show their superiority over the Greeks. The early Christians
acknowledged that the Greek philosophers were very refined people who
had a rich tradition of cultivating wisdom, justice, moderation and
patience. These four virtues were called the philosophical virtues are
were said to be within the grasp of any human being who worked for them.
But in addition to these ordinary virtues, the Christians recognized
three virtues that human beings could never cultivate by their own
efforts. These virtues required divine grace. The three gracious virtues
are faith, hope and love. And these, said the Christians, were available
only through the holy spirit. Therefore, anyone who had those virtues
was said to be spiritual, in contrast to Greeks (and Buddhists and
Manichaeans and so forth), who were not spiritual but merely wise and
virtuous. Needless to say, Buddhists are not at all spiritual. To say of
a Buddhist that she is spiritual is a deep insult, for it is tantamount
to saying that she became what she is not through works (the Buddhist
way) but through divine grace (the way of those who believe in God).

One need not be a Buddhist to have virtues and insights that Buddhists
admire and espouse. And one need not be a Buddhist to have things of
value to say to Buddhists about Buddhism, its doctrines and its
practices.

The place that invited me to lecture was the Elijah School,
www.elijah.org.il, an organization that promotes interfaith
dialogue among members of the world's religions. The school offers at
least one academic course a year, credit for which is given through
McGill University. The theme of the course last August was religious
conversion and whether it is possible for people to have more than one
religious identity. This is a big issue in Israel, since quite a large
number of Israelis have taken refuge in the three jewels or become
followers of Krishna Consciousness or taken up Sufi practice; a question
for many of them, and for their family members, is whether by becoming,
say, Buddhists or Sufis they cease to be Jews. Answering this, of
course, requires a deeper understanding of just exactly what is involved
in being a Jew, or a Buddhist or a Muslim or a Hindu. (Labels are so
easy to thrown around and to apply to others and to ourselves. But we
really think about what these labels may mean a little less often than
we should.)

Who of us is not a hero in his own eyes?

You must be familiar with a different Buddha than I. Or perhaps you just
prefer to pick out different qualities from the same rather complex
Buddha than the ones I most admire. The Buddha I have have most admired
is the fellow who said such things as this: 
-A person who persists in opinions regards as a waste everything other
 than that which, thinking "it is supreme", he regards as best in the
 world. Therefore he fails to get beyond disputes. Then, grasping at just
 that which he sees as commendable to himself in rules of conduct and
 vows and what he has experienced, learned or thought out, he considers
 everything else to be useless. The wise use the term "shackle" for that
 by which one regards everything else as a waste. (Sutta-nipaata 796-798)
-One who is free of judgements has no shackles. One who is set free by
 wisdom has no delusions. But those who take up judgements and opinion go
 about in the world being argumentative. (Sn 847) 
-Any teaching, I think, may be either liberative or imprisoning,
 depending on how it is taken up. If it is taken up with the spirit of
 belittling others, denigrating them and finding fault with them in order
 to make oneself look better in contrast, then the most liberative
 teaching in the world becomes a prison. 
The Buddha, so far as I am aware, was not prone to putting himself in a
prison of deeply held opinions by which he belittled others. True, he
often says that he knows what comes of those who hold various views and
who dispute, and he does not recommend holding views that lead to being
argumentative. But rarely does he dismiss a rival teacher as incompetent
or foolish. In one famous passage in the Pali canon he speaks of
teachers who liberate others but who do not liberate themselves; he
likens them to farmers who plough their neighbours' fields but fail to
cultivate their own land. Such teachers, he says, are effective, but
perhaps not as effective as those who heed their own wise counsel. 
The Buddha even admits that he is not sure whether or not those who
follow other teachers attain the final goal of arhantship; that he is
uncertain implies that he thinks it is possible that they do. I do not
see much evidence that the Buddha regarded himself or his own teaching
as uniquely worthy of being followed.

I can only speak for myself and for those whose conditioning is similar
to my own. I follow Buddhism because it makes and has always made a
great deal of sense to me, and it has helped me to make sense of my
experiences in life, and by following it for years I have become much
more contented and significantly less prone to anger and judgement of
others than I was as a younger man. The fact that Buddhism has served
very well to improve my outlook on both life and death, however, does
not lead me to believe that it is the best religion for everyone. People
differ considerably in their conditioning. I am content to let others
discover for themselves which doctrines and practices serve them best in
their own quest to eliminate dukkha from their lives. I am also content
to let others have other goals than that of eliminating dukkha from
their lives. To each his own. As for me, nothing has pleased me more
than Buddha's dharma.

The self is that which controls or that which is in our control. But
none of the five aggregates that make up our conventional selves is
ultimately in our control. The body is not in anyone's control, so it is
not the self. Nor are any of the aspects of the mind. Accepting that one
is not in control and that one has no self is known as entering the
stream, the first step towards being an arhant. The mind may
mistakenly be seen as the self, but in fact it is not.

The Sangha that is one of the three jewels is not the monastic order
(bhikkhu-sangha), but rather the community of noble ones (ariya-sangha),
which comprises all those lay brothers and sisters and monks and nuns
who have attained to stream entry or beyond. This ariya-sangha is as
valuable to monastics as it is to laity; its value lies in its being a
source of inspiration, a testimony to the possibility of making progress
along the path. During the Buddha's lifetime, several people attained
nibbana without being ordained. By the time of the writing of the
Questions of Milinda, the Buddhist view was that tens of thousands of
lay people attain nibbana for every monk. It is absolutely unnecessary
to be a monk in order to attain nirvana. But since monks have fewer
possessions to take care of, and less hair to worry about, they may have
fewer distractions and an easier life. And this may give some people a
bit of an advantage.

People willingly endure pain in order to get some pleasure or benefit.
If one knows that loving someone will inevitably result in the pain of
separation and then chooses to have the benefits of love and to tolerate
the eventual pain of separation, then that decision is not so much an
example of clinging as it is an example of a mature and well-informed
willingness to accept the partially painful consequences of a decision
to pursue a pleasure that outweighs the pain. When one takes on pain
willingly as part of the deal in gaining pleasure, it does not take one
by surprise and therefore is not disappointment (dukkha). 

I have seen people get all tangled up in trying to figure out whether
God is ineffable in the same way that Nirvana is ineffable, whether the
Buddhist doctrine of anaatman means there is no soul, whether karma is
compatible with divine grace, whether enlightenment is the same as
beatific vision and so on. Rarely does spending time on such problems
bear much fruit or take one any closer to the goal of eliminating the
root causes of avoidable suffering. These questions all fall into the
realm of what the Buddha probably would have called "Questions that tend
not to edify." 

Speaking only for myself, the greatest danger in working with ideas and
practices is that I am prone to seeing my own ideas and practices as the
standard by which all others are to be seen as of lesser value. Perhaps
no one else has the problem, but I have it in abundance. What I find has
worked best for me in dealing with this particular problem is to take
several steps. First, I try very hard to be clear about what other
people are actually saying, not assuming either that they are saying in
other words the same thing that I believe, nor assuming that they are
somehow disagreeing with me and therefore need to be punished. Second, I
try very hard to see in exactly what ways another person's beliefs and
assumptions do differ from my own. (This is what I call labelling.)
Third, I try to see the value that the other person's beliefs have for
him or her, how they speak to the other person's conditioning. Fourth, I
try to honour differences by realizing that beliefs and practices that
differ from my own may do very well to serve other people's needs. 

The word "hinayana" literally means The Vehicle that has been thrown
away,or The Vehicle that is Trash. It appears for the first time in a
sutra whose message was that Sravakayana Buddhism is not genuine
Buddhism at all and should be rejected by all true Buddhists. The usual
definition of a Hinayanin is a Buddhist who follows Buddhism for purely
selfish reasons and has no care or concern for the welfare of others.
One can easily reject the bodhisattva path and still have a deep and
abiding concern for others and thus not be a Hinayanin. It is probably
best to understand that a Hinayanin is any Buddhist whom the user of the
term wishes to characterise as an inferfior Buddhist. It is very much
like the expression "substandard Buddhist". It is true that I do not
like language that creates division and disharmony by expressing
contempt. That is why I do not applaud the use of the word "hinayana".
It was coined for no reason than to create division among Buddhists. Why
honour such a word? I do not judge you negatively for using the term. I
am simply trying to help you understand that you are using a term that
is deeply offensive and hurtful to some people.If you do not wish to
offend and hurt, you might think of seeking alternative expressions. 

One need not be a Buddhist to make authoritative statements about
Buddhist doctrine and theory. One need not be a Buddhist to have insight
in Dharma. One need not be a Buddhist to attain nirvana.

The Buddha himself advised that the most rapid way of progressing on the
path is to have a beautiful friend (kalyaa.na-mitram), that is, a
companion who shares one's aspirations and values and encourages one to
achieve them. It is by mutual help that two or more friends can make the
fastest progress towards dropping their kleshas, thereby dropping their
self-centred clinging. Buddhism does promote intimate relationships. One
can find it said repeatedly in the Pali canon that the best way to
cultivate the path is through association with good friends. It is even
said in one dramatic statement that good friendship is the entirety of
the religious life (brahmacariya). It is said that one can attain
nibbana by a life of service to a good person. There is no reason why
this good person cannot be an intimate friend, provided the intimacy is
founded on a shared love of and dedication to noble values and
liberative practices. In the Bodhicaryavatara, Shantideva says that the
most rapid path to abandoning oneself is to give oneself entirely and
completely (sarve.na sarva.m ca) to another with a heart filled with
love (bhakti) and faith (shraddhaa). By giving oneself entirely to
another, one abandons a self-centred orientation, and as a result of
abandoning the self-centred orientation one transcends one's past bad
karma and puts one into a position where one will not generate any
further bad karma. So a loving relationship is said to be the fastest
path to dropping the self and thereby realising nirvana. 

There are people who say very valuable things about Buddhist (or
other kinds of religious) practice but who do not themselves benefit
much from the knowledge they pass on to others. One should never
minimize the contributions made by such people. They do a service to
others, for which one can only be grateful. If they themselves are
unhappy owing to their inability to practise what they preach, then one
can only be sad on their behalf and hope they themselves will eventually
benefit from the good advice they give to others. 

As far as I know, no one has got rid of all afflictions. Some people
have claimed to have done so, but it is impossible for me to test their
claims. We also have example of people in the Canon, such as Channa, who
believed he had got beyond all afflictions and then discovered he had
not. So we know it is possible to be mistaken about the question of
whether one has become awakened. For that reason, I am content to say
that as far as my own experience goes, I have no reason to believe that
anyone has ever got rid of all afflictions, because I do not have the
capacity to know the mental states of others.

I have a tendency to admit that I don't know when in fact I do not know.
I am willing to make conjectures, but I try not to allow myself to
confound conjecture with certainty. I have conjectured that no one has
ever attained awakening, and I have said that even if that were a fact,
it would make no difference to me, for I would still put all my energy
into trying to eliminate all my afflictions, even if I knew for sure
that I would fail.

Nothing shows just as it is. Everything appears only in the mind of the
perceiver. As we have seen many times, what one person perceives as a
display of some quality, positive or negative, another person perceives
in an entirely different way. I see no way to adjudicate among these
competing perceptions. When there is a dispute, some agree with one
position, some with another. There is no such thing as settling the
dispute definitively.

Siddhartha Gautama ran around calling himself a tathaagata, which can be
interpreted in a variety of ways. He was also called a jina (conqueror),
an arhant (worthy of respect), bhagavan (one possessed of blessings),
sugata (one who has gone well, that is, who has gone to nirvana) and
sammaa sambuddha (one who is completely and fully awake). Later Indian
tradition usually called followers of Siddhartha Gautama by the name
Saugata (those who follow the teachers of the Sugata). The term
"Buddhist" is relatively modern, I think.

One need not be a prisoner of doctrine to make effective use of
doctrines. Similarly, one need not be addicted to a pharmaceutical drug
to benefit by using it.

It does not matter a great deal whether one gets well by taking one
medicine or by taking another. But it can be dangerous to mix two
medicines, even if each by itself might cure one's disease. For this
reason, it is a good idea to put labels on medicine bottles. Since
Buddhism (the teachings of the Buddha), taken by itself, can be a highly
effective medicine for removing some of the avoidable pains of life, it
is not a bad idea to put a label on the package of dogmas and practices
associated with the Buddha, and it may even be a good idea not to mix
this medicine up with other equally effective medicines. Keeping one's
medicine clearly labelled is good pharmacology. Mixing pharmaceuticals
indiscriminately and without knowing exactly what one is doing can be
very bad medicine. Even if it is no longer necessary for you to heed the
labels, it does not follow that you should tear the labels off the
bottles. Others may still need them, and they are not bothering you. (If
labels DO bother you, then you probably need a bit more medicine after
all.)

If anyone is master of myself, it can only be I. No one else can be my
master, I assure you. But even I am not master of myself; I can assure
you of that, too. For if I were my own master, then I would have a self.
But I do not have a self. And I know it. Most of the time. (When I
forget, I usually get into trouble.)

Because very little in the world is purely beneficial or purely harmful,
People will endure that harmful effects of things in order to receive
the pleasant or beneficial aspects of those same things. There is no
real mystery to this.

First of all, I see no way to be sure what mental states lie behind
words. One certainly cannot tell from the words alone, because words can
be written ironically. And even if words are not written in irony,
people may very well read a great deal of emotion into words that the
original author was not experiencing while writing them. Not all that
appears to some people as anger is necessarily anger at all. (Children,
for example, are notoriously liable to attribute anger to parents who do
no more than thwart the child's desires.) So one must be very cautious
in ascribing mental states to other people solely on the basis of words.
Secondly, it is not wise to judge any method by the people who fail use
it and to benefit by it. Even if it couldbe established that people
writing to a Buddhist group were angry, it would not follow that
Buddhism itself is defective. It could very well be that the specific
people writing to the Buddhist group were not practising the specific
forms of meditation that Buddhism prescribes as a remedy for anger. If a
medicine is prescribed by a doctor and the patient does not take it, one
does not usually blame the doctor or the medicine. Nor does one blame
the patient, really; one simply notes that the patient did not take
advantage of a cure and therefore continues to suffer.

The question "what is true?" frankly does not interest me much any more,
although it used to. Strangely, the question "what is true?" seems to
have vanished from my mentality at about the same time I stopped
worrying about self-esteem and gave up being obsessed over the whether
or not I am really a Buddhist.

Your karma has nothing whatsoever to do with events that happen to you.
What your karma determines is only your own reaction to what happens to
you. If, for example, you find it irritating that someone punches you on
the street, you may react in anger. That angry reaction is the
consequence of having developed a habit of reacting angrily to
irritations. If the anger is followed by a desire to harm the source of
your irritation, that desire is a mental karma. That mental karma may be
followed by your speaking harsh words to your assailant, or it may be
followed by your striking her back in retaliation. Then mental karma
(the desire to injure) is compounded by angry words (verbal karma) and
physically damaging action (bodily karma). Alternatively, you may
respond to the irritation of being hit by seeking to help the person who
has hit you get over the pain that has led her to assault you. Your
intention to help your assailant be rid of her intention to harm you
then becomes the basis of a chain of pure karma, which helps both you
and your attacker. 

What the Arabic Muslims called Hinduism was a complex reaction to
Buddhism and Jainism and incorporated many of the best features of both,
while retaining and redefining some of the aspects of the ancient Vedic
religion. Much of what now survives as Hinduism is in fact Buddhism and
Jainism, with a goodly bit of shamanism thrown in for good measure.

I am inclined to see the Skeptics as more in line with the Buddha than
the Stoics, but I agree in general that early Buddhism is hardly
different in any important way from some of the Greek and Hellenistic
philosophies.

From what I have seen, people who follow Tibetan Buddhism are on
the whole not any better and not any worse than those who follow
Vipassanaa, Theravaada, Nichiren, Japanese Zen, Korean Zen or Vietnamese
Buddhism. 

It seems to me that before one truly grasps the fact that nothing in the
universe is personal and that therefore nothing is oneself and nothing
is one's property, then all of one's speculations are flavoured by one
of two fundamental delusions. One is either deluded as an eternalist, or
one is deluded as a cessationist. 

A good beginning would be for him to recognize simply that his biases
differ from mine. A good beginning for me would be to recognize that my
prejudices differ from his.

Of the ten roots of skillful action discussed in Buddhist texts, four
have to do with speech. The four speech precepts together constitute the
limb of the Noble Eight-limbed Path known as Right Speech. Right speech
consists in abstaining from four kinds of harmful speech. They are
enumerated as deceptive speech, harsh speech, frivolous speech and
slanderous speech. Deceptive speech is any kind of speaking (or writing)
that is intended to lead others to believe something that the speaker
knows or suspects to be untrue. It is deliberately misleading others
through either direct lies or through hints and innuendos,or even
through withholding information. Harsh speech is speaking directly to
another person in a way that is intended to hurt that person's feelings,
lower the person's sense of sense-worth or discourage the person from
continuing a fruitful course of action. Frivolous speech is talking
about anything other than Dharma. It is any form of speech that is done
just for the sake of amusement, self-aggrandizement, averting boredom or
distracting attention from the enterprise of reflecting on how to live
and die harmlessly and with dignity. Slanderous speech is any kind of
communication aimed at diminishing a person's reputation or value in the
minds of others. The speech precepts are very subtle and therefore easy
to break. Like all Buddhist precepts, they should be understood as
invitations to reflect on one's own conduct, not as hard and fast laws
or rules, and certainly never as occasions for passing negative
judgement on the behaviour of others. 

Life is too short to read things you find difficult to understand.
Buddhism is extremely simple to understand. It is also very simple to
practice, once you break the old ego-driven habit of thinking you have
to do extraordinarily difficult things in order to receive the most
precious gifts.

It is worth bearing in mind that the liberation offerred by Buddhism is
not absolute liberation. Rather, it is liberation from avoidable forms
of disappointment, namely, those kinds of disappointment that come from
having unrealistic expectations. If you find that you are not
disappointed as much as you used to be, then you have reason to believe
that it is possible to be liberated from disappointment.

No one, ancient or modern, should ever be accepted uncritically and
without question. To question and be critical of our dharma ancestors is
to pay them the deepest respect possible. Simply to repeat their words
without question is more deeply disrespectful than urinating on their
graves. There is nothing at all perverse in questioning the claims of
people who have a vested interest in promoting a particular view of the
truth. People who make canons are nearly always doing so in order to
gain power and control other people and how they think. The Buddhist
canon is no exception. Why else would monks be portrayed as telling a
genocidal king that it is fine for him to kill thousands of
non-Buddhists. To recognize that the inclusion of such a text in the
canon is to promote the interests of the canon-makers is in no way
perverse. It is, however, skeptical in the very best sense of the word.
The "skeptic", as you know, means "one who asks and investigates". How
did the Buddha define wisdom? He defined it as INVESTIGATING the dharma.
He was the most radical skeptic in the history of Indian religions. I do
not find the text in question valid in any way at all. It is a text that
portrays a group of Buddhist monks marching in front of an army that
then takes the lives of tens of thousands of Tamils. When the king of
Lanka then feels remorse for all the carnage, the Buddhist monks tell
him not to worry, since the killed Tamils were not Buddhists and
therefore were subhuman. This text obviously promotes hatred and
justifies brutality and carnage in the name of Buddhism, and it suggests
that monks can absolve lay people of the hideous crime of genocide, so
long as it is done to promote Buddha-sasana. So the text cannot possibly
be a candidate for Sad-dharma by the criteria that I accept, despite the
fact that some people, for reasons of their own, decided to include the
text in their canon. As I have said, there is a very clear standard. And
I take full responsibility for the way that I personally apply the
standard. I am willing to run the risk of rejecting even canonical
teachings if they seem to me to violate the deeper Dharmic principles
that I have chosen to guide my thinking, speaking and acting in the
world. The [standard] is Sad-dhamma. And for it, the criteria have been
given very clearly in the Vinaya. "Of whatever doctrines you are
conscious, if they promote passion rather than peace, self-love rather
than respect for others, wishing for much rather than wishing for
little, love of mobs rather than seclusion, and laziness rather than
making effort, then you may know those doctrines are not Dhamma. On the
other hand, of whatever doctrines you are conscious, if they promote
peace rather than passion, respect for others rather than self-love,
seclusion rather than love of mobs, and making effort rather than
lassitude, then you may know that these doctrines are True Dharma." I am
more interested in truth than in what people agree to be the truth. And
the more interested in truth I get, the more I find only human agreement
to tell the same stories, whether they are true or not, whether they are
useful or not for freeing the human spirit from the shackles that bring
it only pain. 

What the canon says, simply, is that the Buddha declined to say whether
or not an arahant continues to exist after death, because the answer to
the question makes no difference whatsoever. The question is irrelevant.
It is not unanswerable, nor is it one that should not be answered. It is
merely a question to which one needs no answer in order to have a
wholesome and productive practice that leads eventually to the cessation
of dukkha. That attitude makes a great deal of sense to me, I must say.
My own experience bears it out very well. I have learned not to waste
much time on pointless questions, such as whether or not there is
rebirth, or whether consciousness depends entirely on events in the
physical body.

Please note that Eternalism is NOT a miccha-ditthi. It is merely a view
that the Buddha does not himself promote. People who do endorse it, he
says, tend to do so because of their fear of death. Similarly,
cessationism is not a miccha-ditthi. The Buddha endorses neither
eternalism nor cessationism. He remains completely neutral on the
question. So do I.

The question about whether an arahant (actually a Tathagata) continues
to exist after the break-up of his body is one of many unanswered
questions. Another unanswered question is: "Does the world have a
beginning or not?" The Buddha says the answer to that question does not
matter to one who is seeking an escape from dukkha. He does not say that
the world is outside our conceptual framework. He also says that it does
not matter whether or not the life soul is exactly the same as the
physical body; he does not say that the body is outside our conceptual
framework. The meaning of the text is so clear that a child can grasp
it. So why go out of your way to make it say something it does not say,
just to make it sound profound? I can't imagine that the Buddha would
have approved of such obfuscation and such murkiness. Making nibbana
mysterious and outside the scope of reason does not make it any more
worth attaining to one who is interested only in the cessation of dukkha
(dukkha-nirodha, also called, by the Buddha and his pals, nibbana). 

Gratuitous advice is rarely welcome, especially where it is
most necessary.

It is not at all necessary to understand the nature of nirvana in order
to attain it. All you have to do to attain nirvana is to stop craving
things that fail to satisfy you. Craving can be ended in many ways. It
certainly helps to understand that some ways of seeking contentment do
not work, and it may even help to understand why those ways fail. But
understanding is not essential. What is essential is that you stop
seeking contentment in ways that fail to provide it.

Buddhaghosa, in his commentary to the Acchariyabbhuutasutta, defines
papanca as a combination of holding a view, being attached to it and
being contemptuous of those who disagree. 

Why, please tell me, is it inappropriate to say that a child can think
more clearly than the Buddha thought? What makes a buddha a buddha is
nothing more nor less than having awakened to knowing the root causes of
eliminable dukkha and then having eliminated them. One need not think
clearly to do that. And being able to think clearly does not mean that
one has become a buddha. The Buddha was, by today's standards, quite
ignorant of many issues that we today take as common knowledge. He was
not particularly gifted at reasoning. Later Buddhists far surpassed him
in the art of reasoning clearly and concisely. There is such a thing as
progress. Not that it matters much to anyone interested in being
contented and eliminating dukkha, but it is a demonstrable fact all the
same. Let's get this whole issue into perspective. The fact is, I simply
disagree with you about one trivial matter that the Buddha himself
repeatedly warned people not to waste time arguing about. 

In the principal canonical text in which the Buddha explains the
doctrine of no-self, he notes that the body is impermanent, conditioned
and not entirely under the control of our will. That is, it is
impossible to make the body behave exactly as we would like it to
behave. It gets sick, gets injured and dies even though we would prefer
it not to. This is what anatta means: the physical body is not within
our control. What is important to note is that what is true of the body,
according to this same canonical text, is also true of every aspect of
consciousness and the accompanying mental features. The "mind" is every
bit as composite, conditioned and beyond our control as the body is. The
"mind" is therefore no more the self than the body is. The "mind" is no
more nor less real than the body, no more nor less reliable, no more nor
less a refuge, no more nor less one's identity. If one can understand
all the ways in which body is not-self, then one is well on the way to
understanding that "mind" is also not self. (Recall that the Buddha once
said that neither body nor mind is the self, but if one MUST think of
something as the self, then it is better to think of the body as the
self, because it lasts much longer than any mental event.) 

Whether you use Sanskrit, Pali or English words, you pretty much define
them in whatever way best suits your polemical needs, a bit like the
caterpiller in Through the Looking Glass. Is this idiosyncratic way of
redefining key words your way of honouring the Dharma?

Science is a methodology that consists in testing hypotheses and then
eliminating those that fail the test. Science is most decidedly not a
set of conclusions or even a set of assumptions. Science has not adopted
any paradigm at all. It has been a matter of testing a whole range of
hypotheses. In science nothing is ever proved definitively. The only
thing that can be done definitively is to eliminate certain hypotheses.

Science is, by its very nature, free of social, political, asethetic,
moral or commercial values. Buddhism is, above all else, a system of
values. Take the values out of Buddhism, and it ceases to be Dharma. Put
those same values into science, and it ceases to be science. Science and
Buddhism are, always will be and must be operative in entirely different
spheres of life. We need both. Without Dharma we would be utterly lost,
and we would be severely handicapped without scientific method. But God
help us if we get the two realms mixed up. 

Why not content yourself with teaching people to focus on their
breathing and watching the rising and falling of phenomena? That's what
the Buddha taught, and it's what all of us who follow his teachings find
useful. Forgot all this fancy intellectual masturbation about cosmology,
cosmogony, the relationship between mind and matter and all those other
questions. THOSE ARE EXACTLY THE QUESTIONS THE BUDDHA SAID WERE
COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT TO THE TASK OF ATTAINING BHAVA-NIRODHA.

According to Nagarjuna himself, he was seeking to establish the middle
between the view that all things exist and the view that nothing exists.
The view that all things exist is explained further as the view that all
things exist independently and eternally. This false view is remedied by
observing that everything that can be experienced ceases to exist as we
experience it. The view that nothing exists is remedied by observing
that items of experience arise in awareness. The middle way is the view
that all things exist dependent on other things; nothing is independent,
therefore nothing is eternal. 

The division of Buddhists in Hinayana and Mahayana has very little
validity, since there is no practical distinction at all between these
two yanas.

Here is what the word "nihilism" means: 1,The denial of any objective
and real ground of truth. 2, The theory that nothing is knowable. 3, The
theory that no knowledge is possible. 4, The rejection of the validity
of all ethical, religious, political and social values. 5, The denial of
the value of all distinctions. It may be true of nihilism that it
implies amorality, since one of the basic definitions of nihilism is a
radical questioning of the foundations of the distinction between good
and evil, truth and falsity, right and wrong, etc. But there is nothing
in materialism that implies nihilism, nor is there anything in
materialism that implies hedonism or amorality. Your claim is every bit
as fallacious as the claim of those Christians who claim that one cannot
be an atheist and still have a moral foundation. That claim is plain
silly. There is no necessary correlation between any ontological stance
and one's moral view. They are separate domains. 

There is no such thing as mind, according to Buddhism. There is feeling,
concept formation, connation and awareness. And none of these can be made to
behave exactly as one would like them to behave. That fact of not being
within control of the will is what the Buddha called non-self (anatta).

If the sankhaaras were completely within one's control, one would have no
kilesas at all. But one does have kilesas. If it were impossible to have any
influence whatsoever over the samkhaaras, then one could never get rid of a
kilesa. But kilesas can be eliminated. From all this it follows that one
does not have COMPLETE control (the failure of complete control being what
the Buddha says he meant by using the expression "anatta") but one does have
limited influence, which is what makes practice worth doing, albeit
sometimes difficult.

Suffering in this world is experienced as hunger, poverty, degradation,
injury, disease and bereavement. 

You are entitled to your view, of course. But you must admit it is,
well, a view. And the Buddha recommends getting over the thralldom of
views. 

The extreme literalism and lack of imagination of Creationism offends my
sense of what it means to be spiritual. 

I have not yet learned how to advocate the sort of Buddhism that speaks
deeply to my own condition without offending those to whom more
traditional forms of Buddhism speak. Like a good son of the European
Enlightenment, I am always ready to jettison institutional authority if
it stands in the way of anyone's freedom of thought and expression. (It
is impossible for me even to imagine, for example, accepting anyone as
my guru or lord or master or swami.) And I am always ready to discard
any myth that conflicts in any way with the currently prevalent
hypotheses of science. 

The Buddha once said "The wise have a name for a belief that is held
so firmly that one regards others as fools inferior to oneself. Such a belief
they call a prison." This dictum is one that constantly inspires me. It also
presents me with a koan, a problem whose solution is not at all easy to
find. For me the problem is, how do I go about staying out of prison?
How do I learn to hold the value of diversity without holding it so tightly
that I consider those who do not value diversity fools?

There is a statement I have heard several people, including actual
presidents and aspiring presidents, make in recent years. It is recited
like an axiom, a statement whose truth is so obvious it cannot be
reasonably questioned. The statement is "One cannot negotiate with a
terrorist." Why? Why can one not negotiate with a terrorist? To refuse
to negotiate with a terrorist sounds like the equivalent of saying "I
will not pay ransom to a kidnapper" or "I will not give money to a
mugger who sticks a gun in my ribs." If one wishes to live to see
another day, it makes sense to give money to a mugger. If one wants to
see a loved one alive, it makes sense to pay a ransom to a kidnapper.
Indeed, I rather like the Navajo idea that if someone steals from you,
you should go out and apologize to the thief for not recognizing that he
was in such need that he was forced to steal. The Navajo custom of
apologizing to someone who has been forced by circumstances to harm you
does not originate with Buddhist teachings---as far as I know, the
Navajo were thinking this way long before they converted to Buddhism (a
conversion that has not happened yet). All the same, the Navajo ethic
seems to be entirely in keeping with everything I have ever learned
about Buddhism. What a refreshing alternative to the mentality that
divides the world up into friends and enemies, into good guys and
evil-doers, into those who deserve to live and those who must be hunted
down and killed.

Speaking of Protestant Buddhism, Gregory Schopen made the observation
about twenty years ago that there is nothing much more Protestant than
the supposition that allegedly early canonical texts (scriptures, if I
may used that term) contain all the truth in a tradition and that later
developments, insofar as they deviate from the scriptural norms, are
therefore decadent innovations. Hs argument, if I recall it correctly,
was that a scholarly preoccupation with the origins of texts, as if
early texts are necessarily better and texts from India carry more
authority than texts from China, betrays a Protestant bias that could
very well stand in the way of a careful empirical investigation of what
Buddhists have in fact said and believed down through the ages.