[Buddha-l] The arrow: its removal and examination

[Richard Hayes]

On Sunday 24 June 2007 13:07, Katherine Masis wrote:

> I for one don’t know what business, if any, is the
> proper Buddhist one, but if no Buddhist had ever had
> the inclination to lead the examined life, no Buddhist
> cosmology, no Buddhist epistemology and no Buddhist
> psychology would ever have developed.

As one who have spent the past thirty years pouring over works dealing with 
Buddhist metaphysics and epistemology, I am inclined to agree with you. I 
have to long argued that the dichotomy between study and practice is as false 
as it is popular. 

It is not that false dichotomy, or any other kind of anti-intellectualism, 
that I was endorsing. Rather, I was echoing the kind of sentiment (probably 
hopelessly outmoded nowadays) that Husserl expressed when he said that 
philosophy never existed outside Europe. What he seems to have meant by 
philosophy in that infamous claim is closer to what we might call "pure" 
science, that is, an inquiry done purely for the sake of knowledge, with no 
regard whatsoever to anything practical. I don't think Buddhists qua 
Buddhists ever engaged in anything like "pure" science, because they were 
always interested in theory only as a handmaiden to the practical task of 
reducing unnecessary forms of suffering, especially those that arise from the 
way we think (or fail to think).

> I bring this up because for 15-plus years I was a
> member of a very harsh, anti-intellectual and
> hierarchical Zen group based in the U.S.

My condolences for 1) having lived in the U.S., 2) been involved in such a Zen 
group. (If I were more inclined to rudeness, I might ask why the hell it took 
you more than fifteen years to bail out. Fortunately, I am the very picture 
of politeness, so such questions never even enter my mind.)

> To quash sincere inquiry, intellectual or otherwise, was
> standard fare at that place.

I know the type. My classes always have at least a few students whose main 
purpose seems to be to tell their fellow classmates that every hour spent in 
a philosophy class is an hour that could better have been spent on a zafu. 
The only known remedy is to send them to my office to spend the class period 
on a zafu and then flunk them for not understanding anything about 
philosophy.

> For some of us, removing the arrow is the work of a
> lifetime (if not myriads of lifetimes).  While we’re
> at it, I see no problem with inquiring about the
> nature of the arrow, where it came from and why it was
> shot.  Must its removal and examination be exclusive
> of each other?

Does a rhetorical question need an answer? What I would want to add to the 
answer implied in your question is that when inquiry into arrows becomes an 
end in itself, then one has left the project of eliminating suffering behind 
for the project of promoting fletchology. That is probably what the Buddha 
was warning against. And what I was warning against was getting so caught up 
in working out the mind-body problem that one forgets all about dealing with 
all those things that can make having a body and/or mind so messy and 
unpleasant if one is not careful.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico