[Buddha-l] Buddha's Meditation

[Richard Hayes]

On Jul 7, 2011, at 15:24 , Dan Lusthaus wrote:

>> Dan is fighting the demons of his fertile imagination and a priori 
>> assumptions. If you were talking about realities, then you were talking 
>> about different things.
> 
> Another sterling example of Richard demonstrating how he learned to "refrain 
> from being too quick to call them fools and scoundrels."

Thank you for noticing that no one was called a fool or a scoundrel, nor was it even implied that anyone was either one of those things. You see, discussion can be civil if one makes an effort in that direction.

The a priori assumption I was referring to was the claim that universalism (as you called it, thereby introducing a topic quite different from the one I was explicitly talking about, which was pluralism) and relativism are intrinsically immoral. That claim is empirically false. The only way one could sincerely make such a claim would be to make it on an a priori level and to define universalism, relativism and morality in a question-begging way such that your claim becomes true by your idiosyncratic definitions.

I clearly made an erroneous assumption in the way I phrased the second sentence in my observation. Being a Buddhist, and therefore a nominalist and an empiricist, I recognize no other realities than empirical ones, so I thought it would be redundant in a Buddhist context to speak of empirical realities. That was an unwarranted assumption on my part, I can now see, so let me emend my text to read more explicitly, "If you were talking about empirical realities, then you were talking about different things."

I trust that averts the dispute.

Richard