[Buddha-l] Non attached & mindful culinary triumphalism?

[Dan Lusthaus]

> Is that necessarily true when ridiculing "lightweights" on an academic
> forum?

There was no identification of who the lightweights might be, so no specific 
targets were bludgeoned. Unless some are, as the song goes, so vain they 
think that song is about them, no actual harm was done to anyone.

As for the term "narcissist", it does have a specific psychoanalytic 
technical sense, in which case it is usually referred to as "narcissistic 
personality disorder" (NPD -- which has very specific symptoms that are not 
what we are discussing here), but that is derived from a Greek myth that 
predates Freud by a couple of millennia, and so it also, and first of all, 
has a non-clinical sense of someone absorbed by gazing in a mirror. If one 
prefers, we could use the analogous Yogacara term -- vijnapti-matra --  
instead, but then people would think we are talking about idealist 
metaphysics and not the problem of mistaking one's projections for an 
external world.

There is a long history of people attacking *how* things are said when they 
are actually trying to avoid *what* is said.

A proposal, by several people, in several ways, has been given to treat the 
life and death of animals as something other than the life and death of 
animals, to wit, as occasions for determining the degree to which one doing 
the consideration of foodstuffs is "attached" or "nonattached" to the idea 
that killing animals is a problem. Some think their detachment is more 
important than the life of an animal (which only plays a subsidiary role in 
the self-evaluation of level of detachment). The animal becomes a speck on 
the person's mirror, not something that undergoes slaughter. That is a form 
of narcissism.

We have even been treated to a couple versions of the claim that eating meat 
with detachment is "better" than being "attached" to the idea of 
vegetarianism. Why? Because the latter may involve some internal 
psychological agitation.

Then those same proposers also want to ban "psychology" from the discussion 
because it might serve a pejorative function?

Very funny.

All in the name of trying to preserve the "right" to consume flesh.

It's not a "right," it's a capacity, and everyone has to decide for 
themselves how mindful they want to be concerning food, and in which ways. 
In order to decide intelligently, it helps to know what is at stake/steak.

Dan