victorialis

I can give no better report of what is happening this side of the pond, other than to say this electrifying business of proclaiming one's rights has been around for so long that it's an everyday part of the political idiom. Familiarity takes the fizz out of it.

Whether this has been good for politics here, I can't say. It hasn't added clarity to the discourse in those areas where clarity is most needed, and it could be said to have fostered a general political apathy. I don't see single-issue politics as being viable anywhere.

If rights were not merely abstract claims, I think we would not see such profuse and kaleidoscopic variety in the claims being asserted. The rights issues would coalesce around a few undisputable and obvious universals.

It seems to go unremarked everywhere that if rights theory, as it stands, were put into practice, it would play out as a contest that destroys the prize. A peaceful appreciation and enjoyment of our shared humanity is proposed as the prize.

But how much has the peaceful-appreciation-of-shared-humanity quotient gone up in the last decade? How much of this medicine is enough?

All the postmodernist thought I have encountered shares this same paradoxically self-destructive aspect. I keep wondering why it hasn't already refuted itself. Someone recently said to me that political correctness, and postmodernism in art, are "social experiments."

Yeah, well, the Manhattan Project was also a social experiment. We should watch where we're going. Paradoxes are only cool when they're understood.

boneyard bill

Victorialis writes:

Yes. Rights is a perfectly useful expression when it is understood in concrete terms. But these concrete terms involve a relationship that is conferred by the social order, not some abstract universal. However, I don't want this degenerate into a political discussion so I will leave it at that.

Regarding postmodernism, I think Buddhist philosophy has much in common with PM. However, PM leaves the discussion on a negative note. It doesn't have answers, only critiques. Having deconstructed the self it seems to give up in despair. Aside from shunning the experiential side of selflessness (mysticism), it doesn't even go on to promote the logic of our true self-nature as process and inter-relationships. So it's a philosophical dead-end pretending to be profound.

victorialis

Agreed about political discussions and PM, although I am sorry about how PM has turned out. It's hoovered up so much thought in the last 50 years, one could wish it had more to show for itself. Not everyone is comfortable directing their attention inward, and I like to see viable alternatives being developed.

I have to admit, though, I'm unaware of any viable alternative to directing attention inward at some point along the way.

Buddhism has certainly informed postmodernist thought, but I don't know how profitably. PM succeeds at nothing so well as at mass marketing, and "the logic of our true self-nature as process and inter-relationships," as boneyard bill has put it, would be tough to mass-market at present. That's undoubtedly for the best, because packaged for mass consumption, these ideas wouldn't work. To work, they have to be fully understood.

Cut down and oversimplified, they could be mistaken for collectivism. It would therefore be difficult to safeguard the application of these ideas, in dilute form, against collectivism's dysfunctions. We need to improve upon collectivism a great deal before we try anything like it again. We're not ready.

I wanted to say something about Oser's "Former Buddhists" thread, which I found to be very illuminating reading. I suspect that the life-denying aspect that was encountered is an undeniable feature, not of Buddhist philosophy, but of some Buddhists. It's all in how the ideas are applied.

boneyard bill

Victorialis writes:

Do you mean this literally? I've noted some similarities between Buddhism and PM but I wasn't aware of any direct connection. That would be very interesting. Do you know of a direct link between Buddhist philosophy and PM thinkers? I'd be very interested in that.

I definitely agree. In fact, Buddhism is really quite an individualist philosophy, but it could easily be misinterpreted. It could be that a more metaphorical religion like Christianity can get the point across better. Unfortunately, fundamentalist Christians are stuck in this literalism and exclusivism about salvation that makes them a poor vehicle for carrying out that message. And liberal Christians seem to have gone over to political correctness and religion as politics so they haven't a clue.

I find the idea of a Buddhist Christianity to be quite appealing, but I'm probably a minority of about one on that point. But the Christian depiction of divinity as a sacrificial person who suffers and "empties himself" for the salvation of all mankind, who prevails through weakness and love, is a very profound characterization. It is much more appealing than the effete bodhisattva of Buddhist mythology and far more concrete than the Buddhist philosophical image of Emptiness or Void.

But can people believe in a metaphor? Would anyone find Christianity appealing if they understood it as imagery? Of course, the mytho-poetic form is simply a concrete expression of a more abstract idea, and being concrete one can also claim that it is more accurate, more complete, than the abstraction. But I don't know that that would really satisfy anyone who wasn't of an intellectual bent to begin with.

I've given some thought to the idea. Maybe I'll write something down and post it here and see how it flies. Not that this web site is typical.

St. Robert

Dear friends,

I've really enjoyed interacting with you on the subject of desire and suffering.

The bottom line for me is that we simply cannot avoid suffering on our own terms. Everyone suffers in this broken world. For me, learning how to respond to suffering in this life is more important than trying to eliminate the suffering altogether. Paradoxically speaking, some suffering can be healing.

Rather than searching for a way to avoid suffering, Jesus confronted suffering even unto his death on a cross. Many hardcore Buddhist monks are taught to avoid even touching a person with a terminal illness like AIDS, so as to maintain their 'right' path. Jesus, however, would never share this teaching. Not only did he comfort and heal many people of their illnesses, but also commands his disciples to this day to fearlessly confront and heal others purposefully for God's glory. Jesus doesn't just heal people's bodies, but more importantly he restores their spirits and resurrects their souls.

Jesus would tell Buddha that your desire to elminate suffering is good, but that your means are ultimately ineffective. We cannot avoid the fact that our bodies are all slowly decaying and will someday rot away. There is more to us than our flesh. Jesus would tell Buddha and those who practice Buddhism, if you want nirvana come to me and I will give it to you. Jesus promises paradise for all who are willing to take a risk into the unknown and follow Him.

I know many of you have decided not to believe in Jesus, but according to the bible he will physically return to Jerusalem and literally establish nirvana (the kingdom of God)here on earth. I hope to see you there or rather here.

Shalom

AdamWho

Goodbye St Robert but just before you go....

No Jesus embraced suffering, just as the first Noble Truth states.
Absurd straw man argument, you should know better.
The same stories are found in Buddhist mythology (and countless others) only centuries earlier, not that age makes them truer.
If jesus said this then he would be engaging in a straw man argument, because Buddha would agree but would still point to the 4noble truths.
The real risk is not saying magic salvation words but rather ardently following a path such as the 8fold path.
I hope your desire/clinging to these materialistic dreams doesn't cause you or others much suffering in the future.

victorialis

boneyardbill, I'm still ruminating on the relationship between PM and Buddhism. The questions you've posed are so tasty, I want to consider my response thoroughly before I post it; I see several points of correspondence already and might come up with more.

St. Robert makes a good point about how some suffering can be healing. Maybe it is all healing. In spiritually painful circumstances, the only way "out" is "through." On a more temporal basis, recovering from a broken bone also involves some suffering -- more suffering hour for hour, in fact, than in breaking the bone in the first place. And death can be a healing in itself.

I get impatient, though, when Christians advise me that all the good in my life is Jesus and all the bad is me. That's a crude canned answer, and from Christians, I've never heard anything else at those crucial moments.

Christianity does, I think, actually offer more ("there is milk for babes and meat for strong men"), but the more vocal Christians are not offering it. You gotta wonder why.

victorialis

I suggest that Christianity's spiritual appeal (as distinct from its social appeal) is, in fact, transmitted almost exclusively through imagery. Mythopoetic forms are the only safe place to park the more volatile aspects of a religion's esoteric core, e.g. the volatile concept of self-sacrifice.

What the seeker needs in order to receive these messages is not an intellectual bent, but a mystical one -- which, in some, is actually strengthened and complemented by the intellect, rather than being opposed by it.

Mystics read the symbolic content of a mythopoetic device like a road sign put there just for them -- while leaving the nonmystics around them more or less undisturbed.

People do believe in metaphors. We don't always recognize how they operate, or that we've come under the influence; and we're not always very good at expressing what it is we take from metaphors, or why.

That's where doctrine comes in. And doctrine, as the common coin of the religion, manufactures stable, comforting orthodoxy at the expense of the mythopoetic power that attracts people in the first place.

Buddhism seems to manage this inevitable tension between orthodoxy and the esoteric core rather well. Maybe I only think so because I've not lived in places where Buddhism is dominant.

BTW, boneyardbill, my casual homegrown analysis of Buddhism's influence on PM thought has mushroomed over the last few days. I can point to no direct link in the sense I think you meant, and I don't expect to find one, for a reason that should have occurred to me sooner: PM's wildly interdisciplinary m.o. provides a built-in excuse for indiscriminate borrowing.

While standing on one foot, as it were, I was able to identify half a dozen examples of current PM ideas that are poorly but unmistakably informed by Zen -- specifically, by a practice of bompu Zen (which can be completely secular, with no religious aspiration beyond personal well-being).

It seemed to me that these thinkers, unwilling to take responsibility for a type of aspiration that would require faith, had got hold of a book of koan "solutions" and tried to build a worldview from them without owning the experiential knowledge that comes with passing the koan.

Their lack of ownership of the knowledge accounts for the impotency of the worldview they've built. Koans are not generally used to support bompu. The classic bompu approach is patient, expectant gradualism -- a ripening. And such is not PM's nature.

I'm intrigued by your proposal of a Buddhist Christianity. Buddhism's inner experience combined with Christian social mores, or vice versa? How would you combine them?

[ May 16, 2002: Message edited by: victorialis ]</p>

boneyard bill

Victorialis writes:

Have you read Elaine Pagel's work on the Gnostic Paul? She claims that the Valentinian gnostics taught that Paul was saying something very similar to this in his distinctions between the "pneumatics" and the "psychics." Which was also sometimes presented metaphorically as the Greeks and the Jews.

I'd have to think it out and pretty much do the project, I think, to answer your question with any thoroughness. But I don't think I'd approach it from the dichotomy you've suggested. I don't think Buddhist social mores are really that different from Christian ones, and inner experience is too personal and individual to base the reconciliation on that.

Roughly I'd look at it this way. You have metaphysis. Buddhism is generally hostile to metaphysics and emphasizes a radical empiricism instead. On the other hand, you've got mytho-poetic language which is at the core of Christianity. Unlike metaphysics, mytho-poetic language is concrete and specific. It doesn't describe divinity in abstract terms but in conrete ones. And, far more than metaphysics, it evokes an understanding or relationship. So I guess I'd approach it as explaining Christianity as a kind of poetic Buddhism. Christianity seeks to evoke a relationship with the divine. Buddhism explains that relationship in an empirical and scientific kind of way.

boneyard bill

St. Robert writes:

But all of this is essentially was Buddha said. However, Buddha did not say that HE would give us these things. But he said these things are attainable. Yet they are not attainable by the ego. They are only attainable by surrendering the ego which seems to me to be what Paul meant by faith.(The Greek pistis literally means "trust" not blind belief.) So the only difference seems to be the person of Christ. But you say Christ has existed eternally. So how do you know the Buddha wasn't talking about Christ, but he just didn't have the name?