:up:

He seemed otherwise to be reasonable and inquiring. Why not just delete any and all posts which don't pass muster; then those who are constantly having their posts deleted may rethink their ideas and actually grow.

If they think philosophically I would say they are philosophers. — Janus


A big if. Janus we just disagree on this. No point in going on. Take care. — Tom Storm

I'm sure what the implications of the "big if" are. Just to be clear I wasn't saying that people who don't think philosophically can rightly call themselves philosophers, just as people who don't practice art or music can rightly call themselves artists or musicians, or people who don't write poetry are entitled to call themselves poets. It goes without saying that there are good and bad artists, musicians and poets, just as there are good and bad philosophers. applying an objective standard in making such qualitative judgements is not so easy though.

Anyway no problem if we disagree... :smile:

Then we don't have to support our views. — baker

I've offered arguments to support my view. If someone presents a convincing enough argument I will change my view. I invite that, but I'm not seeking it.

Of course you would have to self-identify as a Christian. Basically, if you live according to Christian principles, think of yourself as a Christian and call yourself a Christian; what justification could anyone have for denying that you are a Christian?

That the traditionalists would convince you of their view, that it's their job to do so?
This isn't going to happen. Traditional Buddhism isn't that kind of proselytizing religion. — baker

I'm not seeking to be convinced of any view.

Then where's the problem?

You are you, you believe what you believe, you find possible what you find possible.
Others are others, they believe what they believe, they find possible what they find possible.

What do you want? Respect from the traditionalists?
A recognition that your ideas about what the Buddha really taught are supreme? — baker

It is you and @Wayfarer who say there is a problem with the secular Buddhists. I'm saying there is no problem, when it comes to matters of personal belief regarding rebirth and karma. I'm not seeking respect from anyone, I'm just expressing my opinion about what I think is the case. I've said I see no reason to think that what one believes re karma and rebirth is an impediment to practice. If you think it is necessary to believe certain things then you need to provide an argument and textual support support for your contention.

I have no problem with that, but are they philosophers? — Tom Storm

If they think philosophically I would say they are philosophers. If someone follows Christian morals then I would say they are Christians. I asked before what you think would be the essential features of being a Christian. Belief in heaven and hell, thinking Christ died for our sins, belief in physical resurrection at the end of time, acceptance of Christ as savior, going to church every Sunday, being a Catholic, being a Methodist, being a Calvinist? What?

I don't take Thanissaro's words as authoritative, and I have seen no cogent argument; merely more assertions. Gotama accepted the general opinion of his time and place which was belief in karma and rebirth. These beliefs are common to Hinduism, Brahmanism and Jainism. They are simply culturally entrenched beliefs. Today people, or at least the more thoughtful, are incapable of believing anything without sufficient evidence. This makes belief in Karma and rebirth difficult or even impossible. I see no reason to believe that would preclude people form effective practice.

I already know that one's socioeconomic conditions may colour one's views. But people differ; so no hard and fast generalized conclusions are justified. Each case should be treated on its own merits.

I don't think it's I who needs to think more about this.

But don't you think people are free to define themselves in ways differently than you would?

It's so easy to talk about non-attachment when your life situation is such that you're in a flow of new things coming to you, with no end in sight. It's easy to detach yourself from this piece of cake when you see the next piece coming, or have so far had no trouble obtaining one. — baker

Whose life situation are you referring to?

Ah yes, turning Buddhism against itself. As if the Buddha ever said, “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and common sense.” — baker

This is nothing but your own prejudicial view, and it has nothing to do with that passage you quoted from me, that it is supposed to be responding to. My point was not that belief in rebirth or karma would stand in the way of practice, but that it is not essential to practice. If you can find any text from the Pali Canon that says it is necessary, then present them.

As I thought; you have no argument.

It's so easy to underestimate the religious/spiritual effects of a good socioeconomic status. — baker

So instead of argument you just repeat your assertion?

And whatever feel-good-feelings these secularists have in their "spiritual practice" come from their relatively good socioeconomic status, not from their "spiritual practice", and if anything, they have those feel-good-feelings _despite_ their "spiritual practice". — baker

Your pompous generalizing pronouncements are impossible to take seriously.

No. Secular Buddhists don't try to realize dependent co-arising. Traditionalists do. — baker

Not true according to my reading; they just interpret the idea differently.

Kamma and rebirth are actually implied in dependent co-arising, it's strange to try to consider them separately, on their own. — baker

Do you have an argument to support that?

So, what beliefs exactly do you think are indispensable for one to hold in order to qualify as a Christian?

No amount of commitment to the wrong practice can lead to the right results. — baker

Secular Buiddhists, as far as I am aware, practice the same core way as traditionalists.

When do calculated changes and omissions made to a belief system transform that system into something else? — Tom Storm

In my view it's the core principles of practice and ethical principles which matter; the rest is disposable furniture. If the guy you spoke about follows the moral principles as given in the sermon on the mount, then he is a Christian in my book.

Does someone have to believe in hell and everlasting damnation to be a Christian? Does someone have to believe in the literal biblical story of creation and the fall as described in the story of Adam and Eve?

I think all that matters is whether the practice of the so-called secular Buddhists is as effective as the practice of traditionally oriented adherents. I see no reason why it shouldn't be if the same levels of commitment are in place. In other words, I see no need to consider questions about rebirth or karma in order to practice zazen or insight meditation. The important element is single-minded commitment.

Whether we call secular Buddhism "real" Buddhism or not is not a matter of much importance; it will remain a matter of opinion..

:up: Right, I tend to think that direct and indirect realism are just two ways of speaking about the same thing. Indirect realism says that sense data is filtered through our optical, nervous and neural systems and that's why we only see things "indirectly". This is true, as far as it goes, but all this detail is also then known only indirectly, and the argument is basing itself on this "indirectly" known data. So, if we want to be able to make any cogent argument at all, the idea that by being "indirect" anything is thereby somehow occluded is wrong-headed.So in that sense it remains correct to say that we see things directly, else we cannot make justified claims about how things are.

Buddhism nevertheless embodies a profound metaphysic, that of śūnyatā, however it is an experiential quality, not 'a doctrine' or 'a proposition'. — Wayfarer

I agree with that. I interpret śūnyatā to mean that things have no stable identity. If the idea of stable identity is due to our attachments to things then, releasing that attachment, we might see things as they are, in all their particularity, and not as stable generalized identities.

So, I'm not sure we are disagreeing about enlightenment being a radical shift of how we see things, but not in any doctrinal or propositional sense. I believe that such a shift of being is possible, to be sure.

When it comes to

Can we really tiptoe past the elaborate supernaturalism of historical Buddhism? Secular Buddhists try to, just as people who are sympathetic to the ethical basis of Christianity try to tiptoe past the doctrines of Heaven and Hell, so that Hell becomes “the experience of being unable to love,” or Heaven a state of “being one with God”—not actual places with brimstone pits or massed harps.

I would ask why we would need to tiptoe at all. Of course we must acknowledge that such super-naturalist beliefs have been an integral part of Buddhism in the past, but why would we be constrained to include them in our thinking now, any more than a good Christian would be constrained to believe in the literal existence of hell and damnation?

According to Batchelor there is little or no evidence in the Pali texts to suggest that Gotama was concerned with ontology or the question of truth. His argument is that Gotama was a pragmatist who discouraged metaphysical speculation and answered metaphysical questions differently depending on what he saw as the needs of the questioner. Buddhism, at least in some of its forms, has incorporated those elements, but from that it does not follow that the transformative potential of practice is at all reliant upon them.

If the perception of the bee of the flower is blue and the perception of the flower to me is red, what color is the flower? — Hanover


Red. — Tom Storm

If this were actually possible then the (same) flower would look red to me and blue to a bee. What's the problem?

To @Hanover: The problem I see with your position is that it is self-contradictory. You ask what if the same flower appears red to me and blue to a bee (obviously if they were different flowers then the argument would be totally vacuous) and yet you claim that this shows that the bee and I are not looking at the same flower. :roll:

I read the article and, sorry to say, I found no counterargument to Batchelor's interpretation there. The states you say that some Buddhists devote their lives to realizing are states of non-attachment. I can't sustain that and nor can you, but I've tasted enough to know that such states are at the same time radically different to ordinary states and yet the same. As I said this is knowledge of a kind, but it is not any form of 'knowing-that'- it is instead a radical 'know-how'.

I wonder what makes you think that belief in Karma or rebirth would be necessary to the practice of Buddhism? Soto zen consists in 'just sitting' and that is understood to be no different than enlightenment. Vipassana relies on not dogma, but just on the stages of 'calming' and 'insight'. I think you are clinging to outworn ideas; and I think they are just another form of attachment.

Who is responsible for one's faith in humanity? — baker

"Faith in humanity" is too too general, too abstract. Faith in humanity's what? Faith in humanity's love and compassion? Not everyone is loving and compassionate. Faith in humanity's honesty? Not everyone is honest. What about faith in humanity's ignorance, inability to learn from mistakes, arrogance, viciousness, complacency?

These and other negative traits, particularly in humanity acting en masse, may be even more widely encountered than positive traits, but again not everyone (and who can tell what the percentage is?) manifests these traits.

:up: Although I believe positive traits may be cultivated.

The lens of the bee presents it in an entirely different way. — Hanover

How do you know that if we have, as you claim, no knowledge of the external world?

What drives me is the question whether the Buddha of the Pali Canon as I know him was in fact not trying hard enough to find satisfaction in "life as it is usually lived" (and that such satisfaction can indeed be found, by everyone) and that his teaching on dependent co-arising is wrong. This is a matter of great importance to me. I address it with people who say or imply that he didn't try hard enough and that he was wrong. Batchelor is an author who quickly proved himself irrelevant to my quest. This is all that matters to me as far as he is concerned. — baker

Batchelor seems to me to be asserting that the view of Buddha as life-denying is mistaken and that satisfaction is to be found, if at all, only in "life as it is usually lived". Perhaps you should read his work first and then decide whether is irrelevant to your question. Or not...

If biological systems, including ourselves, act so as to minimise surprise, then why don't we crawl into a dark room and stay there? — Banno

Because we'd starve or die of boredom?

From the Wikipedia article you cited:

In the Pali canon, the distinction is not made between a lower truth and a higher truth, but rather between two kinds of expressions of the same truth, which must be interpreted differently. Thus a phrase or passage, or a whole sutta, might be classed as neyyattha or samuti or vohāra, but it is not regarded at this stage as expressing or conveying a different level of truth.

This is in accordance with what Batchelor says.

Nagarjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā provides a logical defense for the claim that all things are empty (sunyata) of an inherently-existing self-nature.[14] Sunyata, however, is also shown to be "empty", and Nagarjuna's assertion of "the emptiness of emptiness" prevents sunyata from constituting a higher or ultimate reality.[24][25][note 4][note 5] Nagarjuna's view is that "the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth".[25] According to Siderits, Nagarjuna is a "semantic anti-dualist" who posits that there are only conventional truths.[25] Jay L. Garfield explains:

Suppose that we take a conventional entity, such as a table. We analyze it to demonstrate its emptiness, finding that there is no table apart from its parts [...] So we conclude that it is empty. But now let us analyze that emptiness […]. What do we find? Nothing at all but the table’s lack of inherent existence [...] To see the table as empty [...] is to see the table as conventional, as dependent.[24]

In Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā the two truths doctrine is used to defend the identification of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) with emptiness (śūnyatā):

The Buddha's teaching of the Dharma is based on two truths: a truth of worldly convention and an ultimate truth. Those who do not understand the distinction drawn between these two truths do not understand the Buddha's profound truth. Without a foundation in the conventional truth the significance of the ultimate cannot be taught. Without understanding the significance of the ultimate, liberation is not achieved.[27]

This is also in accordance with Batchelor's position, as I read it.

And welcome to the wonderful world of free translations. — baker

Right and what were we disagreeing over earlier regarding interpretation?

The point is that the Buddha would not say the sort of politically correct things that Batchelor and so many other modernists ascribe to the Buddha. — baker

If the most reliable testament we have as to what Gotama actually said is the Pali Canon, and translator's interpret that freely, according to their own prejudices, then the only way you could possibly assess the accuracy of Batchelor's translations would be to be able to read Pali (and even then how would you free yourself from your own prejudices)?

I told you already, there is an old dispute about the two truths doctrine in Buddhism — baker

So what? I haven't said that Batchelor's position is entirely novel or original.

Sometimes, a few words from someone are enough to get a pretty good picture of where he's coming from. — baker

You might get a sense of where he's coming from from "a few words" but you won't know anything of his arguments for holding the position he's coming from.

Even if, due to your own entrenched commitments, you are bound to disagree with someone's position, and you know that from "a few words" it pays to familiarize yourself with the arguments of those whose positions do not agree with yours, even if only to have a coherent understanding of just why you disagree with them.

Beyond this, structures or things or whatever you want to call it, our knowledge is indeed in very shaky grounds. But if something akin to this is not postulated, I don't see how we avoid saying that we make everything up and are left with pure idealism. — Manuel

I agree,. Schopenhauer's critique of Kant's "things in themselves" was that they can't be plural because difference and change is nothing more than a category of judgement, just as space and time are nothing more than the "pure forms of intuition". So there cannot be things unless there is differentiation, which requires space and change, which requires time, both of which Kant claimed were relevant only to the phenomenal and which he denied of the noumenal. But the conundrum is as to how "something" supposedly completely changeless and undifferentiated could give rise to a perceived world of change and difference.

So, I tend to think we do know things, just not exhaustively; and that seems to dissolve the problem, for me at least. I'm not convinced the question "But what are they, really?" is not nonsensical, even though it may seem sensical enough. It relies on the idea of an omniscient mind which could exhaustively know what things truly are in a kind of absolutely total way. I tend to think this is a linguistically induced fantasy.

The problem I see with saying we make everything up and that idealism is the case, is that it doesn't work at all without a God or some such entity, something that guarantees that we all see the same things. Absent a deity it seems to be an idea incapable of explaining anything at all.

I would've sworn in another conversation we had that you thought the idea was useful. — Manuel

I may have said that the distinction is a valid logical one, which I think it is. But I agree with Hegel's critique; that the idea of the thing in itself is just an idea derived by positing the opposite of the for us, an idea which nonetheless irrevocably remains just an idea for us; which makes taking it seriously a kind of a performative contradiction. Schopenhauer's totalizing notion of a blind will does not seem capable of explaining how it is that we experience a complex, consistently integrated world.

The most parsimonious explanation would seem to be that the structures and events we perceive, although obviously not known exhaustively, are real and somehow isomorphic with what is independent of us and our perceptions and judgements. But we are always pushing the limits of language, so if we don't attempt to speak from "beyond ourselves" we will save ourselves from uttering what is pretty much useless nonsense.

To whom is the noumenal important? To those who believe in a kind of transcendence, ie. the religious, the spiritual, the theists. Those who have a stake is some unknowable thing out there being one way and not another. — baker

What possible stake could anyone have in something completely unknowable? The "religious, the spiritual, the theists", contradicting themselves, think they do know something. or at least can, or could, know something "one day", about the purportedly unknowable.

What we know and are familiar with is what we take to be our ordinary image of the world: rivers, trees, clouds, birds, etc. But to attribute these very same things to the world, absent our ordering and classification is not coherent. — Manuel

The reason I disagree with this is that the idea of the thing in itself becomes irrelevant if we absolutely can't know what it is, which is exactly how it is defined. What we do know is that we inhabit a world we share with other non-human percipients, and their behavior towards things shows us that they see the same things (even if not in the exactly the same ways) in the same locations. The whole world is an incredibly complex coherent system comprising countless environments and kinds of entity, all of which hangs together coherently and consistently as a shared world.

So, it's not a matter of attributing anything to the purported "thing in itself" in principle we cannot do that; the thing in itself just is the idea of "something" to which nothing can be attributed. So, I say "fuck the thing in itself, what use is it"? Why do we cling to this incoherent idea of something to which nothing can be attributed?

My only non-Kantian response is to say that the object is whatever creates the experience, but I don't know what that is. — Hanover

Do you know that you don't know what it is? Or do you merely not know whether you know what it is or not, because you are seeking an impossible, incoherent kind of knowledge? You don't think you have better reason for saying it is a flower, some of whose attributes you know, than saying that it is completely unknowable, even if you cannot be absolutely certain this is true?

Read another translation of this:
https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/KN/StNp/StNp4_11.html — baker

That is not even recognizable as the same text and nor is it titled "Chapter of Eights".

Batchelor's translation is suspicious from the onset. The Buddha of the Pali Canon has no qualms about praising himself or the Dhamma he discovered. — baker

The issue was not about whther the Gotama of the Pali Canon praises himself or the Dhamma. Try to focus: perhpos provide me with some quotations which contradict Batchelo'rs claim that

Yet nowhere, not even once, will we find a mention of either sammuti-sacca or paramattha-sacca in any of the hundreds of discourses attributed to Gotama in the Pali Canon. — Janus

He lost me at hello. — baker

Says a lot about your open-mindedness, and nothing about Batchelor. I doubt you have even read his works.

Regarding the idea that sages can, "above and beyond interpretation" directly and infallibly see "the ultimate truth", consider the following from Stephen Batchelor. After Buddhism Yale University Press. Kindle Edition, where he is discussing the "two truths" idea:

"The Theravāda tradition, whose teachings are based on the Pali Canon, sets forth a similar view. The late British scholar Maurice Walshe declares, in the introduction to his translation of the Long Discourses (Dīgha Nikāya):

An important and often overlooked aspect of the Buddhist teaching concerns the levels of truth, failure to appreciate which has led to many errors. Very often the Buddha talks in the Suttas in terms of conventional or relative truth (sammuti- or vohāra-sacca), according to which people and things exist just as they appear to the naïve understanding. Elsewhere, however, when addressing an audience capable of appreciating his meaning, he speaks in terms of ultimate truth (paramattha-sacca).23

In reading Walshe’s text, we could easily get the impression that the Buddha himself spoke of these two truths in his discourses. Yet nowhere, not even once, will we find a mention of either sammuti-sacca or paramattha-sacca in any of the hundreds of discourses attributed to Gotama in the Pali Canon. It is not just that Gotama failed to use that particular terminology; he simply did not think along such lines. As soon as “truth” is parsed in this twofold manner, it becomes difficult to resist slipping into an ontological mindset. “Ultimate truth” becomes a signifier of what really is, whereas “conventional truth” signifies merely what people agree upon as true and useful. What may be the earliest mention of the two truths is found in Points of Controversy (Kathāvatthu), a polemical Buddhist treatise compiled in the centuries after Gotama’s death. The Buddha, the author declares:

spoke two truths, conventional and ultimate—one does not come across a third; a conventional statement is true because of convention and an ultimate statement is true because (it discloses) the real characteristics of things.24

To claim that “ultimate statements” describe the way things really are as opposed to how they conventionally appear is ontology. Yet the Buddha to whom I am drawn in the early discourses is not an ontologist. He has no interest in providing an accurate and final description of the nature of “truth” or “reality.” He warns repeatedly of the dangers of getting sidetracked by metaphysical speculation of any kind, of being caught in what he calls “thickets of opinion.”

As for what Gotama thinks of those who talk about the “supreme” (parama), we only have to turn to the Chapter of Eights, the text cited earlier as an example of a skeptical voice in the early canon:

The priest without borders doesn’t seize on what he’s known or beheld. Not passionate, not dispassionate, he doesn’t posit anything as supreme. One who dwells in “supreme” views and presents them as final will declare all other views “inferior”— he has not overcome disputes."

You mentioned you are unfamiliar with secular Buddhism; Batchelor is one of its chief proponents.

It need only be some noumenal whatever. The flower, for example, could be an algorithm that causes such perceptions in that scenario and nothing more. — Hanover

Why should a "noumenal whatever" with unknowable or no attributes reliably produce the experience of a particular flower? Who wrote the algorithm?

Thinking that way denies the whole ordinary world of shared human experience, so what use is it?

There's a flower in your head and you're asking about the bee in your head. Idealism is strange, but not incoherent. — Hanover

As the old saying goes, there are no flowers in my head, but you can see where they've been, :wink: (Well actually you can't; you'll need to open the skull).

Idealism doesn't seem to provide any explanation as to how the flower I see can be the same flower you see, hence it doesn't cohere with everyday experience, which seems to show that we can both look at, smell, and touch particular flowers (among many other wonderful things which I won't mention here for the sake of brevity and decorum)..

The ol' Bishop Berkeley's God might do the trick, I suppose, if He was Himself a coherent entity, or I guess you could posit a universal or collective mind, but in my experience philosophical idealists never seem to want to go there.

If my perception and the flower are the same thing, that's idealism. There is no external to speak of, so you can eliminate that word as well. — Hanover

Is idealism coherent? What about my perception of the flower, or the bees? Being different how can they all be the same flower?