Some Interesting Reading...
Friday August 11, 2006
It’s Friday, and Friday is the day of the Daily Scribe jamboree. As you may recall, I joined the Scribe – a content network for blogs related, however obliquely, to religion – a few weeks ago, and there’s some good quality blogging out there. The idea of the Jamboree is that on Fridays Scribe members select five other posts from other blogs on the network to highlight.
So here are some interesting reads. Shawn Anthony’s post on humanism is worth a look – particularly his holding out for a humanism that doesn’t deny the value of imagination, story and myth-making. And whilst on the subject of stories, C. Weiss Daniels blogs on reading Steinbeck’s East of Eden, a book that I really should track down and read myself.
On another note over at Arbitrary Marks, CK writes on Nāgārjuna and Causality, and advances arguments against the Buddhist teaching of rebirth. At Little Moves, there’s another take on the subject of rebirth that’s worth a read.
Finally the good quality posts over at Green Clouds keep on coming. This one is about staring at geese, mp3 players, canals, diegesis (what do you mean, you’ve never heard of diegesis?) and Martha Wainwright. To make any sense of how these may be connected, you’ll have to read the full post.
Have a nice Friday!
#2 · Will
15 August 2006
Padmaloka, 1995? That was a long time ago! Good to hear from you.
I share your suspicion of the fully elaborated traditional Buddhist view of rebirth. I may write something in a couple of weeks about why rebirth might nevertheless be a useful idea…
Thanks for your blog and all the best,
Will
#1 · Jonathan Apps
14 August 2006
Will,
In reply to your comment on the Little Moves blog:
”......and have come to conclusion that
the “popular” Buddhist view (that if you a bad “you” will come back as a worm, if you are good, “you” will come back as a higher being) on the subject is utterly incoherent….”
I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently, and think as you do. The thing that strikes me is that NOWHERE do you see processes with the one-to-one correspondence that is claimed by the “popular” Buddhist view.
Thus, when a tree dies, it doesn’t “come back as”, or correspond to in any way, a SINGLE future tree. To the contrary, it gives rise to many diverse natural processes: multiple trees, plants, and food for animals etc.
Another example: when a wave on the sea disperses, there is no single future wave it can be said to correspond to.
Traditional Buddhism, on the other hand, asserts a ONE-TO-ONE correspondence. There is supposed to be a correlation between the being that dies and the next being that is reborn. It is meaningful to ask the question “What was my previous existence?” Even if the previous being wasn’t really “you” due to a continuous process of change, there is still this “one-to-one”-ness.
This argument makes the Buddhist rebith view look pretty suspicious in my humble opinion….....
unless perhaps you go a bit further. It’s quite possible that the examples I’ve given (wave, trees, smashed glasses, lost Ph.D theses on failed disc drives etc.), unlike us, have no illusory “ego” / “sense of self”, or whatever you want to call it. One might assert that unlike us they can’t be counted as unenlightened beings. Maybe this is what singles us out.
This is as far as I’ve got.
Jonathan
PS Met you at Padmaloka, end of 1995, Sarvasiddhi’s study group