Date: 14 Feb 2002 15:24:11 +0200
Subject: AUT: Re: Re: Star Wars and Archetypes


>>> commie00-AT-yahoo.com 02/14/02 03:01PM >>>
> but zen buddhism and taoism as philosophies are "against alienation, for
community" in the here and now, on earth, etc. i think you'd be hard pressed
to find (theistic) religions that agree with this...

Tahir: Oh but they do! They do exactly that; they form these loving caring communities which attract people precisely because it seems a way out of their alienation. Islam in particular makes a very big deal out of the community of believers.

> Tahir: This nostalgia for a past which is part real and part imaginary is
nine tenths of the appeal of all religions today, Islam for example. So
what?

its part of everyone's psychological make-up... the questions are: why? what
could this tell us? simply trying to shirk off these questions with your
statement above doesn't suddenly make these issues not real...

Tahir: What I am saying is that there is nothing unique in Buddhism on any of the criteria that you've come up with. In the Islamic world there were many doctrines that emerged remarkably similar to what you ascribe to Buddhist thought, although they tended to be branded as heresies by the orthodox. Also the Islamic philosophy of thinkers such as Ibn Rushd articulated exactly the kind of 'conservation of energy' views that you associate with Buddhism. I suspect that your isolation of the 'pure' Buddhism, as opposed to the 'religious perversions', has as much to do with what you want to discover there ,  i.e. your preferred brand, as it has to do with any real original purity of doctrine. But I'm not expert enough on Buddhism to take that particular point further. (I did however read the Tao of Physics some years ago...)

What I would like to ask is when Buddhism just exhorts us to get on with the business of living, as you put it, rather than thinking about life and death, etc., what does this 'living' mean? How for instance does it differ from Nietzsche's atheism and celebration of Dionysus? There is nothing in what you said that points us in the direction of dialectics as you claimed earlier. One might just as well say, stop thinking and start partying, or anything similar.

Further on the question of romantic nostalgia. I think the attraction of young people today to Buddhism and other similar phenomena are in inverse proportion to their willingness to engage with capitalism in any critical way. This is confirmed to me on a daily basis so often in the people that I meet that it's virtually a self-evident truth to me. It's just so cool to be quasi-Buddhist and so very uncool to talk about class or revolution or anything like that. These are all attempts to create little communities, little islands of togetherness within the chilly and alienating reality of capitalism. As a young guy said to me recently in a bar: cults are cool!

None of this means that I don't understand the psychological realities underlying these phenomena or that some of the people who are into religion, cults, etc., aren't helluva nice guys or anything. What it does mean though is that we shouldn't treat romantic escapism as if it is something else, something revolutionary. And if what you claimed for Buddhism were true (dialectical, materialist, etc.), Buddhists would be leading the anti-capitalist revolution. But I've never come across a single example of this in my life. Why not?



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