[Buddha-l] Non-Arising

[Dan Lusthaus]

Dee wrote:

>Yes, the twenty yeaer-old tradition of neurosicience is bound to have more 
>insight than the 2,500 year-old tradition of that brown, slanty-eyed lot 
>over in the east. I

Just as recent astrophysics provides more reliable information about the 
cosmos, its composition, layout, and history, than 2500 year old fairy tales 
that always sound like the India of the day in which they were written. If 
you want to know about the solar system, who will you read?

You assume, perhaps, because I threw a few hard questions at Bernhard about 
"experiences" that something cynical or dismissive is at play. The questions 
I asked come directly from Nagarjuna -- no questions are more Buddhistic 
than those. And they are intended to be provocative and force one to 
question assumptions. Also nothing can be more Buddhistic than that.

The assumption that Buddhism solves the problem of subject and object -- a 
problem of distinctly Western invention, with its opposing camps of 
materialists and idealists -- is not borne out by the evidence. 
Unfortunately many "translators" and interpretors of Buddhist texts have 
created the mistaken impression that Buddhists talk about such things. There 
is no word for "subject" in the Buddhist languages, and there are a plethora 
of words -- each with its own distinctive meaning and connotations -- that 
get conflated into the word "object". (One of the reasons that some 
translations sound like nonsense -- the original authors were not mystics, 
but the translators did not respect or recognize the careful distinctions 
the authors were drawing).

And don't accuse me of being anti-mystical either, not after I confessed 
that one of my favorite Pali suttas is the Bahiya Sutta:

(Ireland)
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/ud/ud.1.10.irel.html
(Thanissaro)
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/ud/ud.1.10.than.html

While we are on the subject, has anyone noticed that in the Pali suttas we 
repeatedly hear about people awakening while *in conversation* with the 
Buddha (or one of his proxies), but hardly ever while alone in meditation 
(aside from Gotama himself)?

Dan