Buddhism - Permanence issue
Charles Reichheld
falsities, in that they are simply words we try to use to refer to a
permanent idea of ourselves and others. I understand the breakdown of
processes, and I wonder if it is correct with this analogy:
Nothing exists independently, so everything must depend on other
things. So how about with pain and pleasure. Under these
circumstances, it seems to work when considering what pleasure would
really be if there were no pain. Pleasure would be pleasure...except
without pain to distinguish it by, pleasure really wouldn't be
anything at all. It would just be some thing, or really just this
"absence" of any meaning at all. This kind of puts me on the same page
with what the mahayana buddhists mean when they say that nothing has
independent existance.
But as I was thinking about this, I considered this notion of
continuos fluctuations, and the absence of any permanence. It struck
me that there is permanence in the very definition of their reality.
Change - continuous change is permanent. And according to them there
has to be these continuous fluctuations in order to dispute
permanence. Would they say that change flucuates from potential
permanence back to more fluctuations? This is contradictory because
there isn't supposed to be any permanence at all...what would the
buddhists say to this?
-Charles Reichheld
Nathan Van Allen
that pleasure could be related to different amounts of pleasure and
therefore itself in a way. Another thing is, there is a black and a
white, but we could relate red to either, without needing the other.
I think that relations are just a quick way for our brain to
understand the world and is either a trick we have to use or use so
often that it would not be normal to think of something without
relating it to other things.
As far as consistent change, I sort of agree and I have an example
that I'd like to try to communicate. Imagine existence as a game of
blackjack. Different players win each hand, maybe some leave the
table or come over to it, things change. What if Atman is like the
rules of the game? The rules don't change, no one can see them, they
aren't really tangible... how would Buddhists respond to that?
Charles Reichheld
when you spoke of black and white, you reminded me of opposites. It
seems we function with the knowledge of either one thing, or another.
In our reality, there is life and there is death. They are opposites.
to further compare to what I meant with pleasure and pain, consider we
take away life, there is no such thing. Then what is death? Are there
different levels of death? It doesn't seem plausible to have any
knowledge of this thing called death without the concept of life.
Without the other, it is simply nothing at all. Maybe this is a better
idea of my understanding of what buddhists mean by the dependencies of
everything. And even if you think about something that isn't really
alive or dead..like a rock. It exists, at least to us living things.
Would the rock still exist if no life did? Would it be dead? Without
one thing, this process of life, everything we understand seems to
fall apart, or at least be rearranged into something completely
diferent.
As far as the black jack game, maybe the buddhists would say that one
cannot compare reality to the game, because there is no such thing as
permanence (besides change). Or maybe the rules of the game are like
reality, in that every process of the game seems to come together to
make the rules. If you lose a card for instance, the whole game would
have to change. Maybe the rules of the game would represent change,
which seems to be the only thing that doesn't "change". I see how that
might not make sense, but I mean it as a metaphor-the rules are
change, and with the rules (change) everything exists dependently.
-Charles reichheld
Nicholaos Jones
be what it is. The buddhists are talking about reality, not
concepts. Maybe there can be no concept PLEASURE without the concept
PAIN -- that's a debatable thesis about how language and conceptual
acquisition works. (For instance, when you learned that getting
burned by the stove is painful -- when you were able to conceptualize
that experience as a painful experience -- did you also have to be
able to conceptualize other experiences as pleasurable ones?) But
even if there is no concept PLEASURE without a concept PAIN, the
(Mahayana) buddhists deny that the relations between concept mirror
the relation in the world; so this is no argument in favor of their
thesis. Their thesis is that pleasure itself depends, for its
existence, upon other things. For instance, they might argue that
there could be no pleasure-feeling processes without bodily processes,
or sensation processes. (Pleasure-processes seem to be at least at
the level of perception, since the same thing can seem pleasurable to
one person but not to someone else -- this must be due to differences
in their interpretations of the sensation, hence differences in their
perception.) And they might ague that each pleasure-feeling process
is itself composed of yet more fundamental processes -- for instance,
the pleasure-feeling process of enjoying the scent of a flower
contains, as one of its parts, olfactory processes in the nose-
processes.
They might also argue that there could be no pleasure-feeling
processes without pain-feeling processes; but that strikes me as a
route they would not take, since there is the more obvious and less
contested route that relies upon the fact that there are, so far as
our experiences tell us, no disembodied feelings of pleasure
(Hollywood scenarios notwithstanding), and since it is not in line
with their general way of establishing dependencies among processes.
(Their strategies are either to show that one process is "composed" of
more fundamental processes, or to show that a process is connected to
some other process on the same "level". They don't try to argue that
each process is connected to its opposite -- that is more a Chinese
way of thinking, that we'll come to when we introduce Daoism.)