“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, May 7, 2012

OOO Class 6: Causality

This was an absolute humdinger of a class. With an incredible presentation by Mrinmoyee Bhattacharya.




Video feed broke up about half way through, but at a convenient point--I recapped and nothing was lost. You've always got the MP3 in any case. Part 2:


Live stream videos at Ustream

1 comment:

sean said...

Listening to causality class while on Buddhist retreat in the mountains. Very nice. Just got to the break, and the moment of the nidanas - which I came up against in my essay yesterday and just shelved for the moment, but I'll have to write another section now - and the image of Contact as the guy with the arrow in his eye.

The interesting thing about this sequence is how it goes: Ignorance, Karmic Formations, Consciousness, Name+Form, Six Sense Doors, Contact, etc. So Contact with the guest is preceded by the existence of the house, which is preceded by the condition of there being house-ness in some identifiable way. "House" is preceded by Consciousness? What about Consciousness arising WITH the object? Here it precedes it. What is this consciousness conscious OF? It's context - because it arises from Karma? This wants more thought. Essay part 4 coming up!

But why I'm commenting before going on with the mp3 is to suggest the interpretation of paticca-samuppada (the nidanas) from a panpsychism lens. Nowhere in the sutta does it SAY that only humans experience this. And the 6 Realms seems to imply that all sorts of beings (like the tree devas that regularly show up to listen to the Buddha's discourses - always being kind of shy and self-deprecating, but sweet) experience this wheel, or they wouldn't revolve around it.

If a tree deva or a hungry ghost or an angry asura is included here, then it's hardly a great step to include the tree itself, hunger itself, ambition itself?