notes and a linky treat at the bottom
http://xkcd.com/275/
Readers, comrades, and folks...
I will write something substantial (ie of some sort of substance/thought) in a little while.
For now you will have to enjoy only this small thought and then the Buddhism notes for the week. Below are links, two of them. The first should be read with the hunting article, the second on its own at your leisure, it is on Marguerite Harrison (star of the 1925 film Grass, which is totally awesome, and also a spy (read the parts on her spying, it is pretty nifty). So, I hate hunters (as a bloc of society, some of them might actually be good people, but even if that person raises sheep for a living…well, there are a lot more sheep than wolves, and so said hunter/herdsman should really just seek better protected pasturages. I think it is damned barbaric. Though…“Aerial Gunning Permit” might just be the three best words in the English language--well, so there are much better combinations, but as far as legal terms are concerned…fuck it all I am moving to Idaho, getting that airship, outfitting it with Maxims, and hunting Nazis…who wants to come along for the fun and bathe in their master-racy blood with me?
Notes for Buddhism--these are taken pretty much as near to verbatim as possible, so if they sound flighty, then they are. Much as I would love to take credit for any of the ideas expressed here, I cannot...yet, mind you, YET! I will be writing a paper on certain Buddhist doctrines (due next Friday--the 16th). Ciao for the moment.
Comments and such on everything are always welcome (even on the Buddhist notes, if you want to know more about something, ask and I'll see if I can make up an answer on the spot). Went adventuring in the downtown 'Mall' tonight...terrifying to a degree, and then we went out to the actual University Park Mall...alos terrifying but for different reasons. Tah for the moment.
9/28.
If no sentient being is possessed of a self or a soul, if they are devoid, empty of a self, what is reborn, what is liberated?
Emptiness. We’ve already seen that the Buddha taught that the things of this world, all the things that comprise the world, including sentient beings, are impermanent--things are so impermanent that in some sense they are always instantaneous--reality is a series of flashing events. There is a set of similes Buddhist tradition uses to capture these teachings:
All conditioned phenomena (All dependently originated things)--so, all things
Are like a dream, an illusion (as in a magician‘s trick/mirage), a bubble, a shadow
like the dew, or like lightning.
You should discern them like this.
--The Buddha said that all things in the world are like mirages, the whole world is a mirage--that is to say all things of the world are not what they appear to be. This is a fairly tricky metaphor or simile that the Buddha uses--think of a traditional mirage--thirst combined with tricks of vision lead to one seeing a body of water on the horizon, there seems to be an ocean off there--the Buddha said that everything in this world is like such a mirage--but he is not denying that mirages occur--he is not dismissing this world and saying that it does not exist--he is saying that it exists, but that the way it exists is like a mirage--the Buddha hovers between denying and affirming the reality of this world. Buddhism defines itself as a middle path, philosophically between denying the world and an affirmation of that world--and that is what dependent origination is--we all live in a mirage, and we ourselves are mirage-like. Someone might immediately pop up and say that this is like The Matrix. To be real is to be mirage-like, which is both a good and a bad thing--mirages, after all, are wonderful, magical things--if you live in a world of mirages and are a mirage, then things that from a common-sense point of view would be impossible become magically possible--the world has a special kind of beauty and power that we do not sufficiently appreciate because we do not know it is like a mirage. Dependent origination in its general sense means that no thing exists in and of itself--no thing is solid or substantial--all things that are, are insubstantial--to say a thing is insubstantial is not to deny its existence, but rather to characterize the way it exists. What we are trying to do is understand what it is like to live in a world you have realized is a mirage (hence the doctrines of emptiness, no-self, etc. Now to answer the inline question--a triangle comprises the outline of a triangular space, right? What if…it comprises the inline of space--those three lines (and angles) do not comprise the outline of a separate area of space, rather, from a Buddhist point of view, the lines represent the inline of the rest of the cosmos--for the triangle to exist it must depend on everything that surrounds it--so if you were to entirely nullify that triangle, erase it totally, the universe would collapse--each and every thing is woven into a pattern of the whole, and pulling one thread unravels that pattern. Each and every thing is empty, or void (sunya)--the noun of which is sunyata…ata transforming an adverb/adjective into a noun. Emptiness. The way in which all things are utterly dependent on other things for their existence. Technically, the term is short for subhava-sunyata--empty of own-being, self nature. Buddhists say we are empty of autonomous self nature--when Buddhists teach this doctrine to others, the others assume Buddhists are denying the world--the opposite is actually true, the Buddha moved to save all sentient beings, and each being, each thing in the world, is empty of self-existence--the things in the world empty in this sense are still real, they really happen--but their happening, their reality, consists in their relationships to all other things. Buddhism is making a claim we’ve seen in other philosophies--No man is an island, if a clod of earth washeth away from the shore, Europe is the less--etc, most things of John Donne get this across--each and everything implies everything else. Radical interrelatedness of a sort--for this, each thing needs to be empty of a separate reality--the truth of no-self for sentient beings. Persons exist--Buddhism does not deny that--simply showing that the persons who really exist do so in dependence of all other people, all other beings and things. If we try to disconnect ourselves by indulging in an attachment to a separate self-hood--we are making a fundamental error about the nature of ourselves. Compassion for others has a central role, a value, that we might call objective, in Buddhism--it is valuable in and of itself--how can that be? The doctrine of no-self illustrates how that can be--if you understand in a concrete sense that you are empty of distinct self-hood and therefore involved with all others, compassion follows from that automatically, you really have no choice once you realize there is no hard and fast separation between that imagined self and others. The doctrine of dependent origination and its corollaries tell us what we truly are--and freedom consists in a kind of contentedness in being mirage-like--freedom from craving, the emptiness of things has the positive implication lurking in it that each particular thing is empty of self but full of everything else--these other things expand it to the point of totality--each thing contains and implies all other things. Indra--resides in a palace of unearthly beauty and wonder--covered in a vast net…and the net is made up of jewels at each knot--so we have the jewel net of Indra--the jewels located at each knot are facetted in such a way that if you look at one jewel you see all the other jewels, the whole of the net--this works for every jewel that comprises the net--this is another metaphor that Buddhists use to describe the positive aspects of the doctrine of emptiness, the universe in a grain of sand (William Blake). How do we explain, though, the process of rebirth, if all things are without self or empty? Buddhists do not absolutize consciousness, they do not have a super-atman, as Hinduism does--Buddhists see consciousness as a process, a series of moments, rather than an absolute mind. Buddhism is a kind of radical pluralism--to be real is to be multiple--the multiplicity of the world has a pattern or shape to it--particular consciousness events are related to other events--all reality is radically different albeit interconnected. One life must produce a subsequent life--causes must produce an effect--there must be effects if there are causes, and we know there are causes. We sometimes use the terms transmigration and metempsychosis--we imagine rebirth as a process in which something spiritual in one body takes up residence in a new body, Buddhists do not see it in quite that way--they see one life and the next life as roughly analogous to a billiard table--rolling one ball in a direction, it hits another ball, which moves in another direction, hitting another ball--the relationship of lifetimes is rather like that--the balls move, but they do not transfer parts of themselves--only energy, nothing solid or material transmigrates from one billiard ball to the next. The process of rebirth is due to cause and effect--life A causes life B which causes life C etc. When we speak of a person being reborn we are not speaking accurately--what we should say is that person A at time T (that person’s death) produces person B at time T+1. So since the person who will emerge in one of those hells contains no part of me (imagining you have led a life of utter immorality, and get stuck with the shit-pool hell)--if the person in hell is simply an effect of me, it is no skin of my nose if that person suffers in hell--the Buddhists say that our concern to behave well in the world is for the sake of others--we want fewer beings to be born in hell--the purpose in Buddhism is to reduce the suffering of all those beings who are or would be in hell--that is why you should care, because there is a being who is out there suffering, and you are somehow (thanks to dependent origination) linked to them--what happens to others effects you, even across time, across the distinction of past, present, and future. People do not eat animals because there is continuity--in other words, upon the death of a moral reprobate, they produce a being that will suffer in hell--technically the being suffering is not the reprobate, but the reprobate would be the cause of that suffering. The notion of not eating meat to avoid eating one’s parents is a sentimentality of Buddhism tied with Confucian filial piety--a Buddhist philosopher would still be concerned with the increase in future suffering and present misdeeds. Deep in this doctrine is the ground of compassion, the rationale for compassion towards others. Are involvement with others follows that we seek a reduction of suffering generally. There are popular and…scholarly, theological systems of belief--one which the people can grok and change as they will, and the other which is a bit…deeper. We are empty so that we can be full of all other things. We are dealing with rather difficult notions of Buddhism now--the doctrine of emptiness has all kinds of implications--one of them is that to understand things are without self is to discover the weakness and the flaws built in language. Buddhists see language as a necessary but imperfect tool--language implies that there are things out there in the world, things that can be separated from other things--this, according to Buddhism, is part of the fallacy of language--the discovery of no-self reminds Buddhists how flawed an instrument language, and the kind of thought that relies upon language is quite imperfect. That table is empty of self-existence--it is impossible to speak accurately about that table, nothing I say will suffice. The doctrine of emptiness, thus, has a reflexive meaning. When I say ‘that table is empty’ it seems I am saying that table is empty--Buddhists believe you are actually saying something about yourself, that you cannot speak of that table fully, you cannot describe the world fully as it really is--experience it yes, but that experience is never capturable in words or concepts, it always eludes are attempts to describe it--we are acknowledging a deficiency in our habits and speech--there is a reminder of the need to be cautious about language, about all efforts to capture things in words--you will think you have this theory which will let you get a handle on things…and then things slip away, eluding you let again--this is why silence is valuable in Buddhism--often when the Buddha would be asked a question, he would remain utterly silent--Buddhism is full of these paradoxes and contradictions, Buddhism boasts that the Buddha taught 84,000 doctrines--so this makes you think that he had to speak a lot: all the speech of the Buddha accounts to a resounding silent--and that is what emptiness really means, it is a reminder to shut up, restrain your compulsion to capture things with language, to arrest the mirage-like process of that table and capture it in a word or sentence--this is why Buddhists privilege negative language in describing things. We have apophatic discourse (X is not this, not that)…and cataphatic discourse--God is all this, all that, most high--yet there is always something more--language cannot capture it all--so negative discourse is easier to use. Language is used by Buddhists to stifle language, to tell speakers to stop speaking. When Buddhism got to China, Taoism was the religion that was most welcoming, that worked with a lot of what Buddhism had to say--including the preference for negative discourse in Taoism--though there are some differences, there are enough similarities that they can get along. Silence is the ultimate in negative discourse.
9/30--Buddhist Cosmology.
The Buddhists live in a different world, a world which they think of as being very different from the western conception of the world--conceptually speaking, an entirely different place--if we are to understand Buddhism, we need to be familiar with the rudiments of Buddhist cosmology--the inner world, the world where liberation is achieved, where we discover the nature of things, is intricately bound up with the outerworld, the macrocosm. The Ptolemiec worldview has been dropped (unfortunately) from the western cosmology--this cosmology of heavenly spheres with the earth at their center--and replaced by a heliocentric, Copernican cosmology--this shift was accompanied by profound changes in the way in which westerners viewed themselves and their place in the universe--as science advances we have come to experience the vastness of the universe, just how small our planet, our solar system, hell, our galaxy, is in the grandest of schemes--this has altered modern man’s conception of who we are as humans and challenged traditional religious beliefs. Buddhists have their own cosmology--and we need to know not only how Buddhists lived their lives, what ideas they entertain, but how they saw the cosmos and their place in it. This will be the topic for the next two class periods. See diagram of the world-system and continents surrounding Mount Meru. This view is part inherited from pre-Buddhist Indian traditions--the world is centered around the base of a colossal, axial mountain (Mount Meru)--or sometimes Mount Sumeru--this is what you see in the diagram--this is the axis of the world (axis mundi)--the summit of that mount is the center of the world. The cosmos is thus the sumeru-world. The glowing white lights that circle the flanks of mount meru are the major constellations (there are twenty eight of them)--and on the left the sun (the moon is on the right)--the Buddhists conceive of the heavenly bodies as rotating latterly--they did not rise and set--they moved in a circle parallel to the ground--this leads to interesting calculation challenges in astronomy--ancient Indian astronomy is very complicated. Then the rising yellow peaks in concentric circles are a series of mountain ranges that surround mount Meru--and each range is separated from the next by an ocean. So there is this vast mountain (we are talking Mountains of Madness vast)--surrounded by six concentric mountain ranges each separated by an ocean--and outside the sixth mountain range in a particularly large circular ocean are four vast continents (north, south, east, and west)--the word for these is dvipa (also meaning island)--our world, the world we inhabit, is the southern continent, the continent located in the sea beyond the sixth mountain range south of mount Meru--this land is called jambu-dvipa--the Island of the Rose Apple Tree--this is the functional equivalent of the earth--usually depicted as an inverted triangle in dark blue--there are other continents (of the other directions) inhabited by other beings, but humans live in the south one. And there are multiple hells to which people may be reborn if they were morally reprehensible--these are located immediately underneath jambu-dvipa. And then there are a series of planes stacked above the summit of Meru, these are the heavens--located directly above the summit of Mount Meru. This is a very rough outline of how the Buddhists conceive the structure of the cosmos--the other continents, in Indian imaginings, are understood to be really strange places outside the human realm--there are strange creatures there, imagined in the way that Europeans imagined the far-side of the world--weird places where humans did not routinely visit. And one could not be reborn (generally speaking) to one of the other continents--stories are told about them (some are paradisiacal), but they do not play a major role in Buddhism. There is also the Preta-loca--the space for hungry ghosts--it is technically on the same plane as humans, except invisible to us--they live on the surface of the southern continent, just on a different dimension of sorts. The southern continent is shaped rather like the Indian subcontinent--ancient India assumed that the subcontinent was pretty much the whole of the world. How did pre-modern Buddhists represent the cosmos (see a Tibetan tapestry)--usually both a lateral and top-down view is combined--the mountain has a wide base, tapering towards the center and widening at the summit--emerging out of an ocean (which is either square or circular depending on the text)--and around that ocean are mountain ranges. You see the top of mount Meru itself, which is one of the lower heavens (there are 18 different ones, the lowest are almost terraces on the upper regions of Mount Meru--the heaven at the summit is the Heaven of the 33 Gods. The design in the center of that heaven represents the palaces of the 33 gods, including Indra--he and 32 subordinate deities hang out here. And then you see the continents located south, east, west, and north of the mountain ranges--ringing these oceans and continents is a ring of mountains presumed to be made of iron--sometimes this cosmos is thus referred to as the iron-bound cosmos. As Buddhism evolved, the cosmology expanded--eventually speaking of a virtually infinite number of worlds--as many worlds as there are grains of sand in the bed of the Ganges river--theoretically each of them has its own Mount Meru--a smaller number are different in shape, called Pure Lands--other worlds which are unlike our world in that they lack impurities--in later traditions Buddhists hope to be born into a Pure Land. Though in Mount Meru world even the gods suffer--if in ways humans cannot understand. The cosmos is represented in all different forms--bronze sculptures that are kind of like armillary spheres, stone sculptures, there are loads of depictions. And we also have maps of Jambu-Dvipa--the inverted egg shape being analogous to that of the Indian subcontinent--here we are halfway between cosmology and geography--we have the headwaters of the Brahmaputra, Indus, Ganges--China, Japan, Mongolia, all that stuff--even fairly late in Buddhist history (see .PDF file) we have early 18th century Japanese maps of the world combining geography and old Buddhist cosmology--this was a consequence of studying Jesuit maps of the world. Surrounding the cosmos are four no-place realms--this cosmos is in three dimensions--there is what is called the kama-dhatu (dhatu=realm) kama (desire)--this is the lowest dimension of the universe, the realm of sensual desires that we inhabit-- “above” this is the rupya-dhatu, the world of pure material form--not accessed through senses and appetites, rarified materiel. Then we have the arupya-dhatu, the immaterial world. In a vain effort to define this world we often see the four-concentric squares surrounding it all--purely spiritual heavens (the other heavens are all material realms of a sort)--this are the highest of Buddhist heavens--the formless realms. A yojana--equal to about 7 km, is the standard unit of measurement--Mount Meru’s base is 80,000 yojanas wide--and the ocean surrounding it is likewise 80,000 yoj. The final ocean is 322,000 yoj from the last mountain ring to j-d, and another 322,000 Yoj from that point to the iron mountains. This world could also be viewed as a series of cylinders resting on top of one another--the earth is an island in the sea south of Mount Meru--humans who die living unworthy lives just go underneath that world, but if you are reborn in one of the heavens you go to the summit of Mount Meru to the heavens there or above it. You cannot see Mount Meru from jambu-dvipa--Mount Meru is made of precious substances (crystal, beryl, lapis, etc)--it is vast in height and breadth, and denizens of jambu-dvipa do not get to see it unless they meditate extensively. Almost all that happens in human experience happens on or under the southern continent.
The first heaven is that of the yaksas--earth spirits, tree gods, etc--and then the heaven of the four great kings, the four guardians of the world. Gates in Buddhist monasteries are usually flanked by statues of four divinities--often holding weapons or striking manly poses--these are the guardians of the world, each guarding a direction. On top of Mount Meru is the heaven of the 33 gods--then above that is the palace of Yama--then there is the tujta heaven (heaven of the satisfied one)--it is from this heaven that Buddhas are born into this world--it is from this heaven that the Buddha chose to be reborn from the Sakya people, etc, to ender into his final lifetime during which he would become the Buddha. All that is represented here are material heavens, of course--see the slides for charts on the various heavens, all very carefully plotted out. One reason to dwell on this is because the Buddhists integrate their cosmology into their religious lives. When we study meditation we learn that when Buddhists enter deep trances, they understand themselves to be moving from one plane to the next--Buddhists understand a person to rise from one plane to the next in the cosmos--beaming oneself up from the surface of jambu-dvipa to the higher planes of heavens--this is taken quite literally. The lowest hell is called the Avici hell--the hell without pause--the constant punishment. This is the largest and most populous of the hells--most people who go to hell really deserve it--there are hot and cold hells for the various tormented.
Changes in cosmology have ramifications for other dimensions of life, politics, ethics, economics, all of these things are shaped by our conceptions of the world. It is conceivable that eventually Chinese, Japanese, or Indian mathematicians would have come to the same conclusions as Copernicus--had not Europeans arrived with that conception--do most Buddhists subscribe to the old Mount Meru cosmology--not any more, Buddhism is in a state of transition on this subject--with the uneducated holding the traditional views and those more exposed to western science holding more modern views. This is not always the case--some educated Buddhists still hold to the old views.
http://www.idahostatesman.com/531/story/921480.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marguerite_Harrison
Readers, comrades, and folks...
I will write something substantial (ie of some sort of substance/thought) in a little while.
For now you will have to enjoy only this small thought and then the Buddhism notes for the week. Below are links, two of them. The first should be read with the hunting article, the second on its own at your leisure, it is on Marguerite Harrison (star of the 1925 film Grass, which is totally awesome, and also a spy (read the parts on her spying, it is pretty nifty). So, I hate hunters (as a bloc of society, some of them might actually be good people, but even if that person raises sheep for a living…well, there are a lot more sheep than wolves, and so said hunter/herdsman should really just seek better protected pasturages. I think it is damned barbaric. Though…“Aerial Gunning Permit” might just be the three best words in the English language--well, so there are much better combinations, but as far as legal terms are concerned…fuck it all I am moving to Idaho, getting that airship, outfitting it with Maxims, and hunting Nazis…who wants to come along for the fun and bathe in their master-racy blood with me?
Notes for Buddhism--these are taken pretty much as near to verbatim as possible, so if they sound flighty, then they are. Much as I would love to take credit for any of the ideas expressed here, I cannot...yet, mind you, YET! I will be writing a paper on certain Buddhist doctrines (due next Friday--the 16th). Ciao for the moment.
Comments and such on everything are always welcome (even on the Buddhist notes, if you want to know more about something, ask and I'll see if I can make up an answer on the spot). Went adventuring in the downtown 'Mall' tonight...terrifying to a degree, and then we went out to the actual University Park Mall...alos terrifying but for different reasons. Tah for the moment.
9/28.
If no sentient being is possessed of a self or a soul, if they are devoid, empty of a self, what is reborn, what is liberated?
Emptiness. We’ve already seen that the Buddha taught that the things of this world, all the things that comprise the world, including sentient beings, are impermanent--things are so impermanent that in some sense they are always instantaneous--reality is a series of flashing events. There is a set of similes Buddhist tradition uses to capture these teachings:
All conditioned phenomena (All dependently originated things)--so, all things
Are like a dream, an illusion (as in a magician‘s trick/mirage), a bubble, a shadow
like the dew, or like lightning.
You should discern them like this.
--The Buddha said that all things in the world are like mirages, the whole world is a mirage--that is to say all things of the world are not what they appear to be. This is a fairly tricky metaphor or simile that the Buddha uses--think of a traditional mirage--thirst combined with tricks of vision lead to one seeing a body of water on the horizon, there seems to be an ocean off there--the Buddha said that everything in this world is like such a mirage--but he is not denying that mirages occur--he is not dismissing this world and saying that it does not exist--he is saying that it exists, but that the way it exists is like a mirage--the Buddha hovers between denying and affirming the reality of this world. Buddhism defines itself as a middle path, philosophically between denying the world and an affirmation of that world--and that is what dependent origination is--we all live in a mirage, and we ourselves are mirage-like. Someone might immediately pop up and say that this is like The Matrix. To be real is to be mirage-like, which is both a good and a bad thing--mirages, after all, are wonderful, magical things--if you live in a world of mirages and are a mirage, then things that from a common-sense point of view would be impossible become magically possible--the world has a special kind of beauty and power that we do not sufficiently appreciate because we do not know it is like a mirage. Dependent origination in its general sense means that no thing exists in and of itself--no thing is solid or substantial--all things that are, are insubstantial--to say a thing is insubstantial is not to deny its existence, but rather to characterize the way it exists. What we are trying to do is understand what it is like to live in a world you have realized is a mirage (hence the doctrines of emptiness, no-self, etc. Now to answer the inline question--a triangle comprises the outline of a triangular space, right? What if…it comprises the inline of space--those three lines (and angles) do not comprise the outline of a separate area of space, rather, from a Buddhist point of view, the lines represent the inline of the rest of the cosmos--for the triangle to exist it must depend on everything that surrounds it--so if you were to entirely nullify that triangle, erase it totally, the universe would collapse--each and every thing is woven into a pattern of the whole, and pulling one thread unravels that pattern. Each and every thing is empty, or void (sunya)--the noun of which is sunyata…ata transforming an adverb/adjective into a noun. Emptiness. The way in which all things are utterly dependent on other things for their existence. Technically, the term is short for subhava-sunyata--empty of own-being, self nature. Buddhists say we are empty of autonomous self nature--when Buddhists teach this doctrine to others, the others assume Buddhists are denying the world--the opposite is actually true, the Buddha moved to save all sentient beings, and each being, each thing in the world, is empty of self-existence--the things in the world empty in this sense are still real, they really happen--but their happening, their reality, consists in their relationships to all other things. Buddhism is making a claim we’ve seen in other philosophies--No man is an island, if a clod of earth washeth away from the shore, Europe is the less--etc, most things of John Donne get this across--each and everything implies everything else. Radical interrelatedness of a sort--for this, each thing needs to be empty of a separate reality--the truth of no-self for sentient beings. Persons exist--Buddhism does not deny that--simply showing that the persons who really exist do so in dependence of all other people, all other beings and things. If we try to disconnect ourselves by indulging in an attachment to a separate self-hood--we are making a fundamental error about the nature of ourselves. Compassion for others has a central role, a value, that we might call objective, in Buddhism--it is valuable in and of itself--how can that be? The doctrine of no-self illustrates how that can be--if you understand in a concrete sense that you are empty of distinct self-hood and therefore involved with all others, compassion follows from that automatically, you really have no choice once you realize there is no hard and fast separation between that imagined self and others. The doctrine of dependent origination and its corollaries tell us what we truly are--and freedom consists in a kind of contentedness in being mirage-like--freedom from craving, the emptiness of things has the positive implication lurking in it that each particular thing is empty of self but full of everything else--these other things expand it to the point of totality--each thing contains and implies all other things. Indra--resides in a palace of unearthly beauty and wonder--covered in a vast net…and the net is made up of jewels at each knot--so we have the jewel net of Indra--the jewels located at each knot are facetted in such a way that if you look at one jewel you see all the other jewels, the whole of the net--this works for every jewel that comprises the net--this is another metaphor that Buddhists use to describe the positive aspects of the doctrine of emptiness, the universe in a grain of sand (William Blake). How do we explain, though, the process of rebirth, if all things are without self or empty? Buddhists do not absolutize consciousness, they do not have a super-atman, as Hinduism does--Buddhists see consciousness as a process, a series of moments, rather than an absolute mind. Buddhism is a kind of radical pluralism--to be real is to be multiple--the multiplicity of the world has a pattern or shape to it--particular consciousness events are related to other events--all reality is radically different albeit interconnected. One life must produce a subsequent life--causes must produce an effect--there must be effects if there are causes, and we know there are causes. We sometimes use the terms transmigration and metempsychosis--we imagine rebirth as a process in which something spiritual in one body takes up residence in a new body, Buddhists do not see it in quite that way--they see one life and the next life as roughly analogous to a billiard table--rolling one ball in a direction, it hits another ball, which moves in another direction, hitting another ball--the relationship of lifetimes is rather like that--the balls move, but they do not transfer parts of themselves--only energy, nothing solid or material transmigrates from one billiard ball to the next. The process of rebirth is due to cause and effect--life A causes life B which causes life C etc. When we speak of a person being reborn we are not speaking accurately--what we should say is that person A at time T (that person’s death) produces person B at time T+1. So since the person who will emerge in one of those hells contains no part of me (imagining you have led a life of utter immorality, and get stuck with the shit-pool hell)--if the person in hell is simply an effect of me, it is no skin of my nose if that person suffers in hell--the Buddhists say that our concern to behave well in the world is for the sake of others--we want fewer beings to be born in hell--the purpose in Buddhism is to reduce the suffering of all those beings who are or would be in hell--that is why you should care, because there is a being who is out there suffering, and you are somehow (thanks to dependent origination) linked to them--what happens to others effects you, even across time, across the distinction of past, present, and future. People do not eat animals because there is continuity--in other words, upon the death of a moral reprobate, they produce a being that will suffer in hell--technically the being suffering is not the reprobate, but the reprobate would be the cause of that suffering. The notion of not eating meat to avoid eating one’s parents is a sentimentality of Buddhism tied with Confucian filial piety--a Buddhist philosopher would still be concerned with the increase in future suffering and present misdeeds. Deep in this doctrine is the ground of compassion, the rationale for compassion towards others. Are involvement with others follows that we seek a reduction of suffering generally. There are popular and…scholarly, theological systems of belief--one which the people can grok and change as they will, and the other which is a bit…deeper. We are empty so that we can be full of all other things. We are dealing with rather difficult notions of Buddhism now--the doctrine of emptiness has all kinds of implications--one of them is that to understand things are without self is to discover the weakness and the flaws built in language. Buddhists see language as a necessary but imperfect tool--language implies that there are things out there in the world, things that can be separated from other things--this, according to Buddhism, is part of the fallacy of language--the discovery of no-self reminds Buddhists how flawed an instrument language, and the kind of thought that relies upon language is quite imperfect. That table is empty of self-existence--it is impossible to speak accurately about that table, nothing I say will suffice. The doctrine of emptiness, thus, has a reflexive meaning. When I say ‘that table is empty’ it seems I am saying that table is empty--Buddhists believe you are actually saying something about yourself, that you cannot speak of that table fully, you cannot describe the world fully as it really is--experience it yes, but that experience is never capturable in words or concepts, it always eludes are attempts to describe it--we are acknowledging a deficiency in our habits and speech--there is a reminder of the need to be cautious about language, about all efforts to capture things in words--you will think you have this theory which will let you get a handle on things…and then things slip away, eluding you let again--this is why silence is valuable in Buddhism--often when the Buddha would be asked a question, he would remain utterly silent--Buddhism is full of these paradoxes and contradictions, Buddhism boasts that the Buddha taught 84,000 doctrines--so this makes you think that he had to speak a lot: all the speech of the Buddha accounts to a resounding silent--and that is what emptiness really means, it is a reminder to shut up, restrain your compulsion to capture things with language, to arrest the mirage-like process of that table and capture it in a word or sentence--this is why Buddhists privilege negative language in describing things. We have apophatic discourse (X is not this, not that)…and cataphatic discourse--God is all this, all that, most high--yet there is always something more--language cannot capture it all--so negative discourse is easier to use. Language is used by Buddhists to stifle language, to tell speakers to stop speaking. When Buddhism got to China, Taoism was the religion that was most welcoming, that worked with a lot of what Buddhism had to say--including the preference for negative discourse in Taoism--though there are some differences, there are enough similarities that they can get along. Silence is the ultimate in negative discourse.
9/30--Buddhist Cosmology.
The Buddhists live in a different world, a world which they think of as being very different from the western conception of the world--conceptually speaking, an entirely different place--if we are to understand Buddhism, we need to be familiar with the rudiments of Buddhist cosmology--the inner world, the world where liberation is achieved, where we discover the nature of things, is intricately bound up with the outerworld, the macrocosm. The Ptolemiec worldview has been dropped (unfortunately) from the western cosmology--this cosmology of heavenly spheres with the earth at their center--and replaced by a heliocentric, Copernican cosmology--this shift was accompanied by profound changes in the way in which westerners viewed themselves and their place in the universe--as science advances we have come to experience the vastness of the universe, just how small our planet, our solar system, hell, our galaxy, is in the grandest of schemes--this has altered modern man’s conception of who we are as humans and challenged traditional religious beliefs. Buddhists have their own cosmology--and we need to know not only how Buddhists lived their lives, what ideas they entertain, but how they saw the cosmos and their place in it. This will be the topic for the next two class periods. See diagram of the world-system and continents surrounding Mount Meru. This view is part inherited from pre-Buddhist Indian traditions--the world is centered around the base of a colossal, axial mountain (Mount Meru)--or sometimes Mount Sumeru--this is what you see in the diagram--this is the axis of the world (axis mundi)--the summit of that mount is the center of the world. The cosmos is thus the sumeru-world. The glowing white lights that circle the flanks of mount meru are the major constellations (there are twenty eight of them)--and on the left the sun (the moon is on the right)--the Buddhists conceive of the heavenly bodies as rotating latterly--they did not rise and set--they moved in a circle parallel to the ground--this leads to interesting calculation challenges in astronomy--ancient Indian astronomy is very complicated. Then the rising yellow peaks in concentric circles are a series of mountain ranges that surround mount Meru--and each range is separated from the next by an ocean. So there is this vast mountain (we are talking Mountains of Madness vast)--surrounded by six concentric mountain ranges each separated by an ocean--and outside the sixth mountain range in a particularly large circular ocean are four vast continents (north, south, east, and west)--the word for these is dvipa (also meaning island)--our world, the world we inhabit, is the southern continent, the continent located in the sea beyond the sixth mountain range south of mount Meru--this land is called jambu-dvipa--the Island of the Rose Apple Tree--this is the functional equivalent of the earth--usually depicted as an inverted triangle in dark blue--there are other continents (of the other directions) inhabited by other beings, but humans live in the south one. And there are multiple hells to which people may be reborn if they were morally reprehensible--these are located immediately underneath jambu-dvipa. And then there are a series of planes stacked above the summit of Meru, these are the heavens--located directly above the summit of Mount Meru. This is a very rough outline of how the Buddhists conceive the structure of the cosmos--the other continents, in Indian imaginings, are understood to be really strange places outside the human realm--there are strange creatures there, imagined in the way that Europeans imagined the far-side of the world--weird places where humans did not routinely visit. And one could not be reborn (generally speaking) to one of the other continents--stories are told about them (some are paradisiacal), but they do not play a major role in Buddhism. There is also the Preta-loca--the space for hungry ghosts--it is technically on the same plane as humans, except invisible to us--they live on the surface of the southern continent, just on a different dimension of sorts. The southern continent is shaped rather like the Indian subcontinent--ancient India assumed that the subcontinent was pretty much the whole of the world. How did pre-modern Buddhists represent the cosmos (see a Tibetan tapestry)--usually both a lateral and top-down view is combined--the mountain has a wide base, tapering towards the center and widening at the summit--emerging out of an ocean (which is either square or circular depending on the text)--and around that ocean are mountain ranges. You see the top of mount Meru itself, which is one of the lower heavens (there are 18 different ones, the lowest are almost terraces on the upper regions of Mount Meru--the heaven at the summit is the Heaven of the 33 Gods. The design in the center of that heaven represents the palaces of the 33 gods, including Indra--he and 32 subordinate deities hang out here. And then you see the continents located south, east, west, and north of the mountain ranges--ringing these oceans and continents is a ring of mountains presumed to be made of iron--sometimes this cosmos is thus referred to as the iron-bound cosmos. As Buddhism evolved, the cosmology expanded--eventually speaking of a virtually infinite number of worlds--as many worlds as there are grains of sand in the bed of the Ganges river--theoretically each of them has its own Mount Meru--a smaller number are different in shape, called Pure Lands--other worlds which are unlike our world in that they lack impurities--in later traditions Buddhists hope to be born into a Pure Land. Though in Mount Meru world even the gods suffer--if in ways humans cannot understand. The cosmos is represented in all different forms--bronze sculptures that are kind of like armillary spheres, stone sculptures, there are loads of depictions. And we also have maps of Jambu-Dvipa--the inverted egg shape being analogous to that of the Indian subcontinent--here we are halfway between cosmology and geography--we have the headwaters of the Brahmaputra, Indus, Ganges--China, Japan, Mongolia, all that stuff--even fairly late in Buddhist history (see .PDF file) we have early 18th century Japanese maps of the world combining geography and old Buddhist cosmology--this was a consequence of studying Jesuit maps of the world. Surrounding the cosmos are four no-place realms--this cosmos is in three dimensions--there is what is called the kama-dhatu (dhatu=realm) kama (desire)--this is the lowest dimension of the universe, the realm of sensual desires that we inhabit-- “above” this is the rupya-dhatu, the world of pure material form--not accessed through senses and appetites, rarified materiel. Then we have the arupya-dhatu, the immaterial world. In a vain effort to define this world we often see the four-concentric squares surrounding it all--purely spiritual heavens (the other heavens are all material realms of a sort)--this are the highest of Buddhist heavens--the formless realms. A yojana--equal to about 7 km, is the standard unit of measurement--Mount Meru’s base is 80,000 yojanas wide--and the ocean surrounding it is likewise 80,000 yoj. The final ocean is 322,000 yoj from the last mountain ring to j-d, and another 322,000 Yoj from that point to the iron mountains. This world could also be viewed as a series of cylinders resting on top of one another--the earth is an island in the sea south of Mount Meru--humans who die living unworthy lives just go underneath that world, but if you are reborn in one of the heavens you go to the summit of Mount Meru to the heavens there or above it. You cannot see Mount Meru from jambu-dvipa--Mount Meru is made of precious substances (crystal, beryl, lapis, etc)--it is vast in height and breadth, and denizens of jambu-dvipa do not get to see it unless they meditate extensively. Almost all that happens in human experience happens on or under the southern continent.
The first heaven is that of the yaksas--earth spirits, tree gods, etc--and then the heaven of the four great kings, the four guardians of the world. Gates in Buddhist monasteries are usually flanked by statues of four divinities--often holding weapons or striking manly poses--these are the guardians of the world, each guarding a direction. On top of Mount Meru is the heaven of the 33 gods--then above that is the palace of Yama--then there is the tujta heaven (heaven of the satisfied one)--it is from this heaven that Buddhas are born into this world--it is from this heaven that the Buddha chose to be reborn from the Sakya people, etc, to ender into his final lifetime during which he would become the Buddha. All that is represented here are material heavens, of course--see the slides for charts on the various heavens, all very carefully plotted out. One reason to dwell on this is because the Buddhists integrate their cosmology into their religious lives. When we study meditation we learn that when Buddhists enter deep trances, they understand themselves to be moving from one plane to the next--Buddhists understand a person to rise from one plane to the next in the cosmos--beaming oneself up from the surface of jambu-dvipa to the higher planes of heavens--this is taken quite literally. The lowest hell is called the Avici hell--the hell without pause--the constant punishment. This is the largest and most populous of the hells--most people who go to hell really deserve it--there are hot and cold hells for the various tormented.
Changes in cosmology have ramifications for other dimensions of life, politics, ethics, economics, all of these things are shaped by our conceptions of the world. It is conceivable that eventually Chinese, Japanese, or Indian mathematicians would have come to the same conclusions as Copernicus--had not Europeans arrived with that conception--do most Buddhists subscribe to the old Mount Meru cosmology--not any more, Buddhism is in a state of transition on this subject--with the uneducated holding the traditional views and those more exposed to western science holding more modern views. This is not always the case--some educated Buddhists still hold to the old views.
http://www.idahostatesman.com/531/story/921480.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marguerite_Harrison