The Mystery of the Trinity Solved
September 30, 2021 – 10:07 amThus are God the Circle, God the Triangle, and God the Square all One God
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_ new pronouns
September 15, 2021 – 8:27 pm_ pronouns are _, _, and _. They may not be written or pronounced, for you are not worthy.
Tags:Daosheng On Buddha-Nature and Sudden Enlightenment
September 8, 2021 – 9:55 amThe Buddha-nature (fóxìng – which translates Sanskrit tathAgatagarbha meaning the ‘matrix of the thus gone’ or buddhadhAtu meaning ‘the realm of the enlightened one’) was the subject of the second of Daosheng’s teachings that we will consider. The Buddha-nature was supposed to be that part of a being’s nature which made it possible for the being to achieve the enlightenment that the Buddha achieved. It was thus that part of the Being’s nature that approximated to (shared in / was identical with / what you will) the essential nature of the Buddha. Although most schools would agree on the purely functional characterization just given, yet there is little agreement on what exactly it was that instantiated the function or realised the potential. Some considered it to be a quality of Mind, or the undefiled mind, or (in the Lankavatarasutra) the universal mind (of the Yogacaras,) while others considered it to be simply nothingness or non-being itself. In any case, it was disputed whether every sentient being possessed the Buddha-nature and was thus able to achieve enlightenment. Daosheng was amongst those who thought that it was a universal quality of sentient beings and that certain important consequences followed from this fact.
Since his treatise on this has not survived his relevant arguments have to be extrapolated from his other commentaries, but they seem clear enough in general. From his reading of the various sutras he concludes that every being does have the Buddha-nature, although not every being realises that they do. The task for each being is to achieve this realisation and to use that realisation to become enlightened and thus fully actualise their Buddha-nature. Daosheng envisioned the Buddha-nature as being whatever it was that was able to enjoy nirvana given that according to the most basic truth of anatman there was ‘no self.’ He further held that Buddha-nature was identical with nirvana and sunyata. His arguments for this point are not specified but we might assume that since nirvana (extinction) and sunyata (emptiness) are without characteristics or parts it is not possible to enjoy them or to participate in them while having characteristics and parts; therefore this thing, if it was to ‘enjoy’ extinction and emptiness could only do so as a kind of participation – and by the nature of extinction and emptiness, participation in them could only be identification with them. This being the case, and Buddha-nature being thus without characteristics, there would be two further consequences. First, being indivisible into parts, it could not be grasped in parts: it was all or nothing, which supported the claim of sudden enlightenment. Second, being inapprehensible from outside – since it has no qualities for any perception or comprehension to grasp – to know the Buddha-nature is to participate in it; so that the understanding of the Buddha-nature leads to instant enlightenment and liberation.
Tags:Sengzhao’s Arguments are Weak
August 10, 2021 – 8:57 amThe doctrines and attitudes and practices that are thought of as typical of the Chan school arose early but gradually after Buddhism had been introduced to China. In particular, the early Chinese Buddhist scholars Sengzhao and Daosheng are considered to have laid the philosophical groundwork for the Chan school. So far as we can be sure of them, however, their arguments for these doctrines are rather weak.
We shall consider just the first of these. Sengzhao (384-416,) was, so it is said, originally a Taoist who upon reading an old translation of the Vimalakirti Sutra became an enthusiastic Buddhist, and eventually a disciple of Kumarajiva – one of the most productive of the earliest translators and interpreters of Buddhist documents. In Xi’an (which was then the capital Chang’an) Sengzhao assisted his master in the translation and interpretation of Indian texts but he also began to make his own contributions. These can be found in his Book of Zhao (Zhao Lun,) a collection of essays, of which three are of primary significance in preparing the ground for Chan. It is particularly worth noticing that the arguments made in all three essays might be made in essentially the same way by a Neotaoist as easily as by a Buddhist.
- Objects Do Not Move
In the essay on mutability and immutability Sengzhao argued the paradoxical point that there is at once no change and no immutability; or equivalently, that everything is both changeful and immutable; or even better that changefulness and immutability are equally vacuous terms referring to nothing. To make this claim he observes that any entity that is in the past never becomes an entity in the present because it is always in the past. Everything is therefore absolutely immutable, frozen in the instant of its existence (whether present or past.) On the other hand, since the passage of time must necessarily involve the sequential being and non-being of all things absolutely, there is nothing but mutability. By way of a clarifying example he gives us the man who left his village as a youth and returns as an old monk. We observe here that everything about the man has changed so he is a different entity, but he is nevertheless still the same man (called Fanzhi) so he is the same entity, so what is the same and immutable is also different and mutable. Unfortunately, this is just the old problem of the preservation of identity through change that we recognise from such classic examples as the Ship of Theseus, and rather detracts from than advances the purely conceptual argument that it is supposed to illustrate.
- Unreal Emptiness
In the essay on Being and Not-being he argues that nothing purely exists or does not exist; in everything that exists there is the quality of non-existence and in everything that does not exist there is the quality of existence. Of everything, whether it exists or not, it may therefore be said that it both exists and does not exist. His argument is that if something purely exists and has no quality of non-existence, then it would always be so qualified and so could never fail to exist. In particular, its origination is not dependent on the operation of causes in the world – contrary to what the Buddha claimed about all existent things. Similarly, for anything that does not exist, if it has no quality of existence within it then it can never do other than not exist, with all the same unwelcome consequences as for necessary existence. This is a marvellously paradoxical result, but its conviction for modern audiences is undermined by the inadmissibility of the assumption upon which the argument is based: that existence – and non-existence too, for that matter – may be treated in the same way as property predicates like ‘tall’, ‘happy’, or ‘blue.’ This assumption is known to lead to all sorts of problems and is almost universally rejected now.
- Wisdom Has No Knowing
Finally, in the essay on wisdom he argued that that could not be considered as a kind of knowledge – or at least not any kind of propositional knowledge. Such knowledge, we observe, is knowledge of something – we cannot speak of having that sort of knowledge without acknowledging that there is an object of knowledge. Such knowledge essentially involves an apprehension of the qualities of a known thing. If prajña (bo re), or sage-wisdom (shèng zhi) as Sengzhao calls it, is an apprehension of the Absolute Truth, then, given that the Absolute Truth is that there is nothing to be apprehended, sage-wisdom cannot involve the apprehension of the qualities of some object, and therefore cannot count as knowledge in the normal sense. In fact sage-wisdom is more like knowledge by acquaintance of Non-being, or even an actual identification with that state, a kind of knowing how to be non-existent. Of course, it was not established that any such knowledge was possible at all, so the move to understand what form that knowledge could take rather begs the question.
Tags:Le Libre arbitre
July 9, 2021 – 10:06 pmChacun a le sentiment d’un libre arbitre même si il n’y croit pas. Chacun a le sentiment que c’est possible à faire autrement que ce qu’il fait ; il n’a qu’à choisir autrement que ce qu’il a choisi. Enfin, il a le sentiment que ce qu’il fait est la conséquence d’un choix et la responsabilité de ce choix est à lui. Voilà pour ses sentiments. D’autre part, certains pensent que nous sommes tous des objets physiques et toutes nos actions sont ordonnées par les lois de la Nature. Ces lois n’admettent qu’un seul résultat pour leur application sur une situation donnée. Pas de place ici pour un choix parmi des possibilités. Face à ce choix entre notre connaissance scientifique du monde et nos simples sentiments de liberté, nous choisissons forcement le première choix, et nions la possibilité d’un libre arbitre.
Mais cet argument, tel qu’il est, doit nous mettre un peu mal à l’aise. Selon l’argument, si nos actions ont une cause, alors on ne peut pas nous les attribuer. Autrement, si nos actions n’ont pas une cause ? Sont-elles en ce cas à notre crédit ? Non ? Alors, que nos actions soient causées ou non elles ne sont pas notre responsabilité. C’est une conséquence un peu trop bizarre même pour un philosophe ; mais où est le problème fondamental ? Il y a pas mal de réponses que les philosophes offrent : mais peut-être qu’il n’y a qu’une simple erreur de raisonnement. On peut construire d’autres arguments similaires à celui ci-dessus qui ne sont pas convaincants. Par exemple, supposons que le moteur de ma voiture cesse de marcher parce que sa batterie est à plat. Peut-on vraiment attribuer le problème à la batterie ? Non, parce-que l’opération de la batterie est déterminé par les lois de la Nature et il y a une autre cause antérieure pour ce changement dans son opération. Pensons-nous donc que nous ne pouvons pas dire que la batterie est responsable ? Non, nous ne le pensons pas. Alors, pensons-nous que l’argument contre le libre arbitre est de la même nature et échoue de la même façon ?
Tags:La Logique
July 9, 2021 – 10:05 pmLa logique a été découverte par Aristote, ou peut-être il l’a inventé. Selon la version traditionnelle, il avait remarqué que parmi certains arguments les raisons garantissent la conclusion. Il n’est pas possible que les raisons soient vraies et la conclusion fausse. Un argument de cette sorte nous appelons maintenant ‘valide’. Aristote a en outre noté que pour certains des arguments, c’était la forme elle-même de l’argument qui garantissait la validité. C’est évident par exemple qu’un argument avec la forme ‘si A alors B, et A, alors B’ est valide – en fait c’est valide ‘formellement’. le système de règles relatives à la validité formelle est ce que nous appelons la logique. Et maintenant, on peut utiliser la logique pour découvrir si un argument dans la langue courante est valide ou non : tout simplement, si l’argument original puisse être mis dans une forme valide, sans perdre le sens de l’original, l’argument doit être valide.
Bon, mais comment savons-nous qu’une forme est valide ? C’est peut-être un fait de l’univers, mais ce n’est pas une chose que nous avons découverte par l’observation comme nous avons découvert la forme du monde. Nous pouvons admettre la possibilité que le monde soit plat, mais nous ne pouvons pas même comprendre la proposition qu’une loi de la logique ne tienne pas. C’est peut-être donc une loi de la pensée – c’est-à-dire, psychologique. Mais non, parce que personne n’accepterait que les arguments valides pour un singe, un chien, ou un extraterrestre soient différents que les arguments valides pour nous. Encore, on ne peut pas même comprendre la possibilité. Donc nous nous retrouvons avec un mystère. Les plus surs de nos arguments reposent elles-mêmes sur des fondations sans support.
Tags:L’antidote à l’athéisme
July 9, 2021 – 10:04 pmQu’est-ce qu’un athée ? Quelqu’un qui croit qu’il n’y a pas de Dieu. Pourquoi croit-il cela ? Dans la littérature il y a pas mal de raisons et d’arguments données, mais pour un philosophe il n’y a qu’un seul argument significatif : qu’il n’y a aucune raison suffisante à justifier la croyance en un dieu. L’athée accepte qu’il est impossible à prouver soit que Dieu existe ou non, donc la question de la croyance doit être résolue par d’autre moyens, par les considérations autres que la raison pure ou la preuve. Le plus souvent le philosophe raisonne en cette façon : si les raisons à croire en Dieu sont de la même force que les raisons à croire en des fantômes ou des gobelins, et c’est ridicule les accepter, alors c’est ridicule à accepter Dieu, donc je dois le nier.
Le philosophe en ce cas fait un choix et suivant les règles générales qui détermine si que l’on puisse croire ou non en une idée la croyance en dieu est rejetée. Mais ‘Dieu’ n’est pas une idée comme les autres et il y a peut-être des considérations spéciales qu’il faut qu’on prenne en compte. Par exemple si il n’y a pas un Dieu le monde n’a pas une raison d’être. On n’accepterait point pour aucune chose autre qu’il existe tout simplement sans raison. Pourquoi accepterions-nous cela pour le monde entier. En plus, si le monde n’a pas une raison d’être, nous n’en avons non plus. Est-ce que le philosophe pense qu’une vie sans but ni raison vaut la peine de vivre ? Pense-t-il que l’idée d’une vie sans but l’aidera à vivre sa vie ? Non ? Donc on peut douter que le choix d’accepter cette idée est la meilleure que l’on puisse faire.
Tags:The Ruling Bullshits of Our Time
July 2, 2021 – 8:49 pmI put this together in just a half hour or so after talking to a friend who remarked upon how much nonsense we were supposed to believe. Note that I didn’t even have to talk about the temporary bullshits of the current news cycle, and I haven’t mentioned any of the bullshits of the ‘pandemic’.
Western civilisation/society is White Supremacist
- It suffers from Systemic Racism
- Or maybe it’s Structural
- White Privilege
- Whiteness
- Implicit Bias Tests measure something real
- Blacks are over-represented in prison populations
- Blacks are killed disproportionately by Police
- Racism is power + prejudice
- Any racial disparity in outcomes is evidence of racism
- ‘Critical Race Theory’
- All/Only whites are racist
- X is racist (for all values of X)
- Affirmative Action is the opposite of racial discrimination
- The ‘Stolen Generations’
- Race doesn’t exist
- It’s a ‘social construction’
We live in a patriarchy
- Possibly even a “cisheteropatriarchy”
- Any sexual disparity in outcomes is evidence of sexism
- There are no differences between men and women’s psychologies, preferences, capabilities
- “Believe all women!”
Your sexual identity is whatever you say it is
- There are more than two genders
- Gender is a continuum
- Gender is fluid
- Gender is unrelated to sex
- Trans-women are real women (ditto men)
- My pronouns are …
Diversity is an absolute moral good
- ‘Diversity is our strength’
Multiculturalism is the only justifiable option (ITW (=In the West))
- All (other) cultures are equal
- Who are we to judge them or criticize?
- All migrants are net positives for the receiving society (ITW)
- No common culture (ITW) is required or possible or should be defended
- There is no upper limit on the number of immigrants that can be accommodated (ITW)
- Immigration has no downsides – regardless of source, culture, numbers, legality, …
- There is especially no problem with unregulated, unrestricted mass-immigration of Muslims from backward countries
- There are no ‘No-Go Zones’
- Ethnic criminal gangs are not a problem/barely exist
- There is especially no problem with unregulated, unrestricted mass-immigration of Muslims from backward countries
- Migrant assimilation (ITW) is an unjust expectation
- Morality is relative to culture
The environment is deteriorating
- There are too many people
- The planet cannot support us
- Plastic bags! Plastic bags everywhere! They have to be stopped!
- Sustainability is a coherent concept – and an absolute moral good
- Recycling is always worth doing – and an absolute moral good
- We face Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warning
- The Barrier Reef is dying
- Pacific Islands are sinking
- Climate refugees
- The North Pole will be ice-free by [current date + 10]
- The world is doomed because of X (X= acid rain/organophosphates/ozone hole/CAGW/…)
- In order to prevent environmental disaster X, the economic system has to be overthrown
We are too rich (= greedy/selfish)
- Our material preferences are morally contemptible – so ‘middle class’
- the planet cannot support our lifestyle
- Our lifestyle causes environmental deterioration
- We must face the ‘Limits to Growth’
- Economic growth cannot continue because the planet is finite
- The rest of the world can’t become as rich as us
- It is evidence of structural injustice that the rest f the world isn’t as rich as us
- Our wealth is gotten by exploitation of the third world
- We deliberately keep them poor
- The economy is a zero-sum game
Coal, oil, and gas power are too dangerous (they cause CAGW)
- Fracking is dangerous
- Our energy needs can be met with wind and solar power
- Nuclear power is too dangerous
- “No blood for Oil!”
We’re running out of resources
- Peak oil
Organic farming can feed us
- Organic produce is ‘natural’ and so better
GMOs are too dangerous
Chemicals are bad
- Pesticides/herbicides/fertilizers/… are bad
- Plastics are bad
- Plastic bags are filling the oceans
- Medical drugs are bad
- ‘Traditional’ medicines work
- ‘Big Pharma’ suppresses effective alternative treatments to profit from sickness
Modern Art
‘Continental Philosophy’
- ‘Post-Modernism’
- “There is nothing outside the text”
- Reality is a set of discourses
- Discourses are structured to advantage powerful groups
- There is no such thing as objective truth
- Truth is determined by power (Foucault etc.)
- Knowledge is socially constructed
Islam is a religion of peace
- Jihad is a ‘personal struggle’
- They hate us because of the Crusades
- Islamophobia
- We wouldn’t have the Renaissance or Science without Islam
One man’s ‘Terrorist’ is another man’s ‘Freedom Fighter’
Imperialism/Colonialism is only a Western thing
- It’s always bad
- I/C explains why most non-western countries are shitholes
- Most non-western countries are not shitholes
Nationalism is a bad thing and nation-states are bad
- ‘Patriotism is the last resort of a scoundrel’
- (National) flags are problematic
- Any act to secure (our) borders is immoral
- It’s a ‘refugee crisis’
- ‘Push factors’
- (Other) people have a right to live wherever they want
- The UN has superior moral and legal authority
- ‘International law’ is law
- Palestine is a nation
- Poor, poor Palestinians. They only want justice.
- Israel is a colonial/settler/apartheid state
Hate speech isn’t free speech
IQ scores don’t measure anything – certainly not intelligence
- ‘Intelligence’ isn’t a thing
- There are no group differences in intelligence
- There are especially no ‘racial’ differences in intelligence
- Evolution stops at the neck
Huayan: Interpenetration
May 12, 2021 – 9:44 amThe idea that phenomena and noumena are the same thing also featured in the doctrines of the Huáyán (??) school, in which it appears as a consequence of a more general claim concerning the interpenetration of all levels of reality. This school is another of those Chinese schools which made an original contribution to Buddhist philosophy. Its name is just the Chinese translation of the Sanskrit avata?saka , or ‘Flower Garland,’ which is the name of a sutra which it regards as especially important and from which it claimed to have derived it’s particular philosophical positions. The doctrine of interpenetration (??, yuán róng,) which we shall now investigate, is supported, for example, by such passages as the following.
They . . . perceive that the fields full of assemblies, the beings and aeons which are as many as all the dust particles, are all present in every particle of dust. They perceive that the many fields and assemblies and the beings and the aeons are all reflected in each particle of dust.
The interpretation of this is that nothing exists as itself independently of every other existing thing, but that everything participates in every other thing. But a mere statement of a position has little value, it requires some support or justification in order to count as more than speculation. In this case the observation is made that no dharmas (psycho-physical atoms) have self-existence, because their existence is dependent upon extraneous conditions. You might remember this as one of the standard claims of the Madhyamaka philosophy of Nagarjuna. The inference is drawn from this, however, that ultimately the existence of anything is dependent upon everything else. Presumably this is partly because it seems plausible that if A depends on B and B depends on C, and so on, then eventually, the world being finite[1], Z will depend on A; and therefore, dependence being transitive, every member of that sequence will depend on every other member of that sequence. Of course, there are quite a few assumptions in there: apart from the two mentioned we would also need to suppose that the world is not partitioned into mutually exclusive cycles of dependency. (We might also have to answer the objection that if A ultimately depends on A, then A has self-existence, but let that pass.)
The argument is also made that since the existence of anything – and thus its identity – is dependent upon the existence – and thus the identity – of some other thing, that ‘one is all’ and ‘all is one.’ Again, the exact steps by which the premisses support the conclusion are somewhat obscure, but if we focus on the ‘identity’ part of the claim, we might be dealing with a kind of semantic holism in which the meaning of the name of a thing – and thus presumably, the identity of a thing – is what it is in virtue of its (conditioning) relationships with all the other named things (and thus their identities.) In the philosophy of language this sort of holism amounts to the claim that ‘dog’ means what it does because that word exists in a particular network of relationships with other words in the language, like ‘cat’, ‘chase’, ‘bone’, ‘pat’, ‘horse’, ‘wolf’, etc. Quite how that holism would work in the ‘identity’ case would be left as an exercise for the reader, but there is a clue to how we might think about it in the use by one of the school’s leaders (the patriarch F?zàng, (?? 643–712)) of a simile involving a rafter and a building.[2] He argues that the building is the rafter because the building is the sum of all its parts and the rafter is one of its parts; and the rafter is the building because the rafter is only a rafter because of the relationship it has to the building. That’s not particularly convincing as an example of the claim that ‘all is one and one is all,’ but if we say that the building is in the rafter and the rafter is in the building, which seems closer to what the interpenetration claim would support, then the arguments from semantic holism would fit better.
A famous image that is used to illustrate this doctrine is that of Indra’s Net
The manner in which all dharmas interpenetrate is like an imperial net of celestial jewels extending in all directions infinitely, without limit. … As for the imperial net of heavenly jewels, it is known as Indra’s Net, a net which is made entirely of jewels. Because of the clarity of the jewels, they are all reflected in and enter into each other, ad infinitum. Within each jewel, simultaneously, is reflected the whole net [3]
The identity of noumena (referred to by li, ?, in the Huayan tradition) and phenomena (shi, ?) which was mentioned above follows from the interpenetration doctrine. It’s easier to see how this might be made plausible if we overstate the case to begin with: thus, if every dharma A contains dharma B and every B contains A, then every A is really the same as B. (This is like the result in set theory that if A is a subset of B and B is a subset of A, then A and B are the same set.) Now if every dharma is the same as every other dharma, and both noumena and phenomena are classes of dharma, then every phenomenal dharma is a noumenal one and vice versa. The Huayan position doesn’t in fact seem to be that every dharma is identical – thought I don’t quite see why it isn’t – but the fact that every noumenal dharma interpenetrates every phenomenal dharma indicates that the two classes are not in fact distinct classes of dharma and so noumena and phenomena are the same thing.
A famous image that is used to illustrate this doctrine is that of the Golden Lion. Fazang used this to explain the point to the empress Wu. He pointed at a golden statue of a lion and said that the statue appears to be a lion, and this is a fact we need to accept, but we also have to accept that there is no lion there, only particles of gold. The gold of the lion is like li, the noumenon, and the lion-appearance is like the shi, phenomenon. The lion-appearance is dependent upon the gold, and each particle of gold is the same as every other particle, so the identity of each particle – in so far as it is distinguishable – can only depend upon the lion-appearance to which it contributes.
[1] In fact, book 30 of the Avatamsaka Sutra appears to deny this.
[2] In Paragraphs on the Doctrine of Difference and Identity of the One Vehicle of Huayan (????????), T1866.
[3] Calming and Contemplation in the Five Teachings of Huayan (??????) T1867. Tr. by Fox, A (2015) ‘The Practice of Huayan Buddhism’, ?????????????, (pp. 259-286,) p. 265
Tags:Two Truths Doctrine Deprecated
May 12, 2021 – 9:07 amNagarjuna’s (2nd-3rd C) doctrine of Two Truths is accepted by all Mahayanists. It refers to a method of instruction in which statements were open to alternative possible interpretations depending on the level of sophistication of the audience; a method that Buddha used in order to make his doctrines accessible. The two truths are distinguished as
- Conventional truth (sa~vrti-satya) which characterizes statements that are true by convention and by which we may describe our daily experience of a concrete world, and
- Ultimate truth (paramArtha-satya) which characterizes statements that disclose the true nature of things and by which we may describe the ultimate reality.
It might be stated, for example, that the achievement of nirvana will lead to the person exiting samsara, and this could be understood under a conventional interpretation as a discussion of the fate of persons; but it could also be understood at another ‘higher’ level as using the non-referring terms ‘person’, ‘samsara,’ etc. and referring to a process that cannot occur in the way indicated. The point of making the statement to an audience that will apply the conventional interpretation is to convince the hearer that there is a reason to follow the Buddha’s teachings to the point that they will be capable of making the second interpretation. The point of the statement is therefore not to convey a truth about the world but to achieve some objective, and the point of claiming that the conventional interpretation gives a ‘conventional truth’ is no more than to validate in conventional terms the worth of the statement to the audience.
In fact, this being the case, we should say that the teachings of the Buddha are not intended to be evaluated in terms of their truth or falsity, but rather in terms of whether or not they lead to success in the Buddha’s intended project of liberation. But if this pragmatic or instrumental attitude towards truth is the proper understanding of the Buddha’s method, then his method is a very risky one, because, of course, once you have allowed that your statements are not to be thought of as true in the ‘standard’ way – even if you now insist that this statement is true in that way – it becomes impossible to make any statement that the audience may reasonably be expected to accept at face value. Even statements of so-called ‘ultimate truths’ may be suspected of being only instrumentally true rather than truly true; and we cannot know what the statements are instrumental for: the Buddha may state that he intends to end suffering and that his teachings are directed towards that end; but maybe that’s just a statement intended to lead us to behave or believe in a certain way, and doesn’t describe Buddha’s real intentions. Who can tell?
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