Debate

[Ray]

There's one significant aspect of all debates like this, whatever the subject, which I've realized that most people seem to be unaware of, and which can sometimes be the cause of a lot of anger and conflict.

It is that everything, without exception, requires interpretation. Even at the most basic level of viewing a scene that one might wish to photograph, the brain and visual system interprets certain light frequencies it receives through the eye as an experience of certain colors. The greenness of a leaf is not a property of the leaf. Rather, the leaf has a property of reflecting a particular wavelength of light which the average, or normal human brain interprets as a sensation of greenness.

We then have a tendency to project that sensation of greenness onto the leaf, asserting that the leaf is green and that we are witnessing reality.

If the leaf could speak, and respond to our assertion that it is green, it would probably say, "Hey Buster! Don't call me green. I am as I am. My greenness is purely a product of your own imagination." 

Even when it comes to very detailed scientific matters, the public at large seems to be unaware of this unavoidable process of interpretation. One sees it in the Climate Change debate. Those who are worried about the future of their grandchildren, and believe that rising CO2 levels are a great threat, get very emotional about the views of skeptics who claim that we cannot be certain about the matter and should treat it as a risk management.

The very fact that such skeptics are often branded as 'Climate Change deniers'  is a bit shocking to me. I sense there is a religious fervour implied by such comments, like categorising everyone into believers and non-believers.

Skepticism is at the heart of scientific progress. Denialism is burying one's head in the sand without reference to any contradictory evidence or any reasonable, alternative explanations.

I'm amazed that quite often, apparently intelligent people will use the consensus principle as justification for their support that Anthropogenc  Climate Change will be disastrous. Have we reached the stage in human development when consensuses of scientific opinion cannot be wrong? They've frequently been wrong in the past, especially when the subject is really complicated, with elements of chaos included, as climate change is.

But let's not divert the topic to climate change. I use this as an example of a type of religious fervour that takes place at an emotional level, even among certain scientists involved in Climate Change research.

How much more difficult it must be to interpret what someone actually said and meant a couple of thousand years ago or more, especially when the words of that person have been relayed by human memory and word of mouth for a number of generations before being written down.

I understand that the gospels were written about 70-100 years after the death of Christ. The Pali Canon was written about 400 years after the death of Gautama Buddha. There's a huge scope for misinterpretation there.

[Alan Klein]

Hey, we're human.  We make mistakes about a lot of things.

[wmchauncey]

Does no one remember paying the "telephone game" as a child...what is said to the first child does not resemble what comes out of the last child's mouth.
That's what happens when folklore is passed down from generations past.

[Ray]

Hey, we're human.  We make mistakes about a lot of things.

Hey! We're the most intelligent life form in the entire universe, as far as we know. Of course we make mistakes, but we should bloody well learn from them. 

[Ray]

Does no one remember paying the "telephone game" as a child...what is said to the first child does not resemble what comes out of the last child's mouth.
That's what happens when folklore is passed down from generations past.

Absolutely! Sometimes referred to as 'Chinese Whispers'.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers

But this is surely just one element in the interpretation problem. In the case of religion, the people passing down the message are not playing a game. They are trying to live the message and understand the spirit behind it.

For all we know, they might sometimes have improved upon the message, and ironed out some of the flaws and incomprehensible statements.

I tend to think this is what might have happened with the Kalama Sutta attributed to Buddha. It seems to be just too sane, and reasonable, and modern to be an accurate description of the Buddha's words. Or maybe that impression of mine is due to the additional difficulty of translation from an ancient language into a modern language. There are some words in ancient languages that simply do not have an exact modern equivalent. We have to make our best guess.

I'm just speculating. I'm not an authority on such issues, but I'm rather fascinated by the entire debacle.

I also felt a slight sense of betrayal when questioning, above, the authenticity of those words in the Kalama Sutta, attributed to the Buddha. If that's what he really said, then Wow!. He's my inspiration.

[wtlloyd]

excerpted from page one:

But quite apart from that, were we not destined for something else, I see no purpose to love, affection, beauty and any of the other factors that make life worthwhile. Brutality would be enough for survival as species. It works for all the others.

Rob C

The "Universe" (for want of a better, all-including word) does not need us to understand or explain it. It has existed without us for billions of years, and will, apparently, be doing so again in a very little time at the rate our species is  eliminating our own habitat.

As far as to the "purpose to love...etc" - we humans value it, and that is reason enough for it to exist. Holy books merely codify good manners our species developed, they came after, not before.

[wmchauncey]

Of course we make mistakes, but we should bloody well learn from them.

We do learn from them...we go from killing our brother with the jawbone of an ass to using a AK-15. 
That's how we became more civilized/efficient in our methods of killing one another.         

[Isaac]

"Morality, then, is a synthesis of the biological and the cultural, of the unlearned, the discovered and the invented. ... It is the insights of rational individuals that make a truly universal and unselfish morality something that our species can aspire to."

The Moral Life of Babies

[Isaac]

the need that we have as a species, a need that I think springs not from fear but from some inner knowledge that this can't just be a happy/unhappy accident.

A classic experiment from the 1940s by the psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel suggested that imputing agency is so automatic that people may do it even for geometric shapes. For the experiment, subjects watched a film of triangles and circles moving around. When asked what they had been watching, the subjects used words like “chase” and “capture.” They did not just see the random movement of shapes on a screen; they saw pursuit, planning, escape.

Supposedly we have come to assume random movements are caused by some purposeful agent; because we're descended from the ones who ran away when the leaves rustled in the wind, and occasionally it really was a hyena that moved the leaves not the wind.

Anyway, as far as I gather from school: matter can neither be created nor destroyed. At best, you can change it. So big bangs, where there is nothing and then there is something, don't seem to compute unless there is divine intervention prior to the banging.

Lavoisier's 18th century Law of Conservation of Mass merged with Mayer's 19th century Law of Conservation of Energy at the beginning of the 20th century; so, on a larger scale, what you gathered from school would be the total amount of mass and energy in the universe is constant.

You may also have gathered that (taking gravity into account) a ball at the top of a slope has potential (negative) energy which can convert to kinetic (positive) energy; and for the universe, supposedly the postive and negative energies cancel out and the total energy is zero -- both now and at Big Bang.

But quite apart from that, were we not destined for something else, I see no purpose to love, affection, beauty and any of the other factors that make life worthwhile. Brutality would be enough for survival as species. It works for all the others.

You don't think it possible that love and affection could bind parents together to care for their children, and so promote their children's survival (and reproduction) more effectively?

Why does the peacock have such a beautiful tail?

[kencameron]

I tend to think this is what might have happened with the Kalama Sutta attributed to Buddha. It seems to be just too sane, and reasonable, and modern to be an accurate description of the Buddha's words. Or maybe that impression of mine is due to the additional difficulty of translation from an ancient language into a modern language. There are some words in ancient languages that simply do not have an exact modern equivalent. We have to make our best guess.

I'm just speculating. I'm not an authority on such issues, but I'm rather fascinated by the entire debacle.

I also felt a slight sense of betrayal when questioning, above, the authenticity of those words in the Kalama Sutta, attributed to the Buddha. If that's what he really said, then Wow!. He's my inspiration.

There is no reason to suppose that the words of the Kalama Sutta as we now read them have anything to do with western/modern "chinese whispers", or mistranslation. The fact that they might "sound modern" isn't really good evidence. The Pali text was written down a couple of hundred years after the Buddha died, based on an oral tradition. There might have been some chinese whispers in there, but only within that time period, and the more striking element is the formal quality of the Sutta which emerges when you compare it with other Suttas. It is a highly structured text rather than a transcription of speech. It has been translated many times into many languages and been the subject of much careful scholarship. The reasonable conclusion is that both the original Pali text and the modern versions accurately represent what the Buddha thought.

For anyone wondering what Ray and I are on about, check out an excellent translation here.

[Rob C]

1.  You may also have gathered that (taking gravity into account) a ball at the top of a slope has potential (negative) energy which can convert to kinetic (positive) energy; and for the universe, supposedly the postive and negative energies cancel out and the total energy is zero -- both now and at Big Bang.


2.  You don't think it possible that love and affection could bind parents together to care for their children, and so promote their children's survival (and reproduction) more effectively?

1.  Potential energy was defined to me as energy by virtue of position; kinetic energy as energy by virtue of motion. That they may have made a zero equation didn't arise (thank goodness - I hated maths even more than physics, though I did pass in both - the physics at a Highers level, but maths as a lowly Lower until I had to go to night school and my wife-to-be coached me through that horror where I converted the Lower to the equivalent of a Higher, too. What torture to someone who only wanted to be a snapper.)

2.  Without some higher principle, I guess only to the level of a wolf or a lioness. Then, early youth over, get the hell out, leave my space and fight for yourself.

I think the entire emotional life we have is based, knowingly or not, on a sense of the divinity of it; that's one of the few reasons I see for the refusal of suicide as a way out. To me, the idea is the throwing of such a gift back in the face of the One who gave it to us in the first place. If there is another life, then what a fine way to reject it.

Rob C

[Isaac]

2.  Without some higher principle, I guess only to the level of a wolf or a lioness. Then, early youth over, get the hell out, leave my space and fight for yourself.

So there's a purpose for love and affection.

A purpose for altruism would be less obvious (but then altruism may be less common).

[Ray]

The Pali text was written down a couple of hundred years after the Buddha died, based on an oral tradition.

My understanding, Ken, is that the Pali Canon was first written down in Sri Lanka about 450 years after the Buddha died. That's an awful long time for errors and misinterpretation to take place. Many folks are a bit concerned that the Christian gospels might not accurately reflect the actual words and life of Christ because they were written about a generation after the death of Jesus and possibly not by any of his disciples or witnesses.

But 450 years of nothing but oral tradition and memorization seems a bit extreme. Imagine the whole works of Shakespeare being written down for the first time today, from the memory of actors who had passed down their rehearsed lines by word of mouth over many generations for 400 years.

Furthermore, the Pali Canon is a lot more voluminous and extensive than the entire works of Shakespeare. I believe it's even bigger than the last printed version of the full Britannica Encyclopedia, which is a mere 32 volumes. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81li_Canon

[kencameron]

My understanding, Ken, is that the Pali Canon was first written down in Sri Lanka about 450 years after the Buddha died. That's an awful long time for errors and misinterpretation to take place. Many folks are a bit concerned that the Christian gospels might not accurately reflect the actual words and life of Christ because they were written about a generation after the death of Jesus and possibly not by any of his disciples or witnesses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81li_Canon

ou are right about the 450 years rather than 200. That would still exclude the notion that the Sutta sounds modern because it has been influenced by modern ideas. However, for me that is neither here nor there, because in my view the text clearly doesn't reproduce the actual words of the buddha - it is highly stylised in a "call and response" way that makes it easy to memorise. The reason this doesn't worry me is that what the Buddha is reported as saying, here and in other suttas, is essentially  "don't take this stuff on authority, try it out and if it works for you, go for it". So even if we could be confident that the text did reproduce his actual words, he would be telling us that we shouldn't give that any great weight. Instead, we should trust our own discovery of its truth (or untruth) through attempting to live it. That is one of the things buddhists mean when they say that the real buddha is within each individual practitioner. "Faith" in buddhism is provisional and has to be confirmed or not by day to day experience.

[Ray]

ou are right about the 450 years rather than 200. That would still exclude the notion that the Sutta sounds modern because it has been influenced by modern ideas. However, for me that is neither here nor there, because in my view the text clearly doesn't reproduce the actual words of the buddha - it is highly stylised in a "call and response" way that makes it easy to memorise. The reason this doesn't worry me is that what the Buddha is reported as saying, here and in other suttas, is essentially  "don't take this stuff on authority, try it out and if it works for you, go for it". So even if we could be confident that the text did reproduce his actual words, he would be telling us that we shouldn't give that any great weight. Instead, we should trust our own discovery of its truth (or untruth) through attempting to live it. That is one of the things buddhists mean when they say that the real buddha is within each individual practitioner. "Faith" in buddhism is provisional and has to be confirmed or not by day to day experience.

I agree. It's the general attitude of mind that's important and the soundness of the advice however such advice might be phrased.

I'm very impressed by the Kalama Sutta because it is so unusual for any religious scripture to advise anyone not to accept what is claimed, by scripture or teacher, without investigating the matter for himself.

However, I sense a slight conundrum here. At the time that the Buddha was giving this address to the Kalamas about 2500 years ago, there was presumably no Buddhist scripture. The Buddhist scriptures (the Pali Canon) were first written down around 29 BC.

The existing religious scriptures of that time in India, and the cultural practices, would have been the Vedas, which presumably the Buddha did not accept after gaining his own enlightenment.

The Kalamas had something better than a mere scripture. They had the Buddha himself to answer their queries, whereas the modern Buddhists have to rely upon the scriptures, as well as older monks and teachers. I'm not sure they would get very far if they began questioning the advice of their Abbots and the thousands of rules in the Pali Canon relating to correct behaviour. 

[Jeremy Roussak]

If the leaf could speak, and respond to our assertion that it is green, it would probably say, "Hey Buster! Don't call me green. I am as I am. My greenness is purely a product of your own imagination." 

Kermit probably felt the same.

Jeremy

[Rob C]

Imagine my disappointment where I'd originally thought this was all leading to a scholarly exposition on the finer points of the Kama Sutra from our eastern correspondent with proven photographic, investigative experience in the ways of the eastern transvestite/transsexual! Can't trust any Internet site no mo'! All is false in those siliconed valleys!

;-)

Rob C

[kencameron]

The Kalamas had something better than a mere scripture. They had the Buddha himself to answer their queries, whereas the modern Buddhists have to rely upon the scriptures, as well as older monks and teachers. I'm not sure they would get very far if they began questioning the advice of their Abbots and the thousands of rules in the Pali Canon relating to correct behaviour. 

They would certainly get into trouble in many places. Buddhism has no immunity from the heresies (distortions of the truth) which affect other religions and is shaped by the cultures in which it is practised, many of which are hierarchical and authoritarian. On the other hand, great teachers are supposed to have realised the buddha's understanding for themselves, so modern students do in a sense have "buddha" ("a" rather than "the") to answer their questions, and in some schools challenging the teacher is accepted, even expected for mature students. And in the West of course everything is up for grabs. My own experience in buddhist retreats is that asking challenging questions of the teacher in public is  acceptable provided it is done respectfully. And in private interviews, not asking a question which is on your mind is considered a missed opportunity. So the empiricist and anti-authoritarian line you find in the Kalama Sutta is still alive and well.

On the "thousands of rules", you might find this interesting - a modern "western" monk explaining why he follows them.

I am feeling vague disquiet about how far this is from the topic. But like all things, my disquiet arises, and passes away.  Time for a coffee.

[Rob C]

Those who are enlightened know how to behave without rules, Stamper.  

Furthermore, the young ladyboy is clearly the real thing: a ladyboy. Where the misrepresentation?

I would also have hoped that all of the postings here were adult material; were I interested in children's stuff, I'd buy Enid Blyton's works. As for pyramid schemes - do they still build those things somewhere other than Vegas?

Puzzled (from Spain)

[michael]

I'm loath to end this thread, but will if it deteriorates further.

Michael