“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


Thursday, January 12, 2012

Buddhism and Aristotle

Of course you can be an Aristotelian Buddhist. Just subtract final and material causes and add withdrawal (emptiness).

It makes much more sense, from a luminosity point of view, than thinking that reality is an illusion subtended by a transcendental beyond. Reality is like an illusion. The like is the key word.

Claiming that Buddhists don't think or appreciate substances is just nihilism or atomism disguised as Buddhism. Buddhists chop wood and carry water. They brush their teeth.

2 comments:

Christopher said...

Why Nagarjuna and the entirety of the "zab mo lta brgyud" (lineage of the profound view) are not nihilists:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/contradiction/#LNCBudTet

".. neither LEM nor LNC is directly at stake in the tetralemma: you can have your Aristotle and Buddha too."

In this sense, young man, you are quite correct.

:-)

Petrus said...

Yes, quite interesting, the use of these two words together, like and illusion... To wit, from the Aspiration Prayer of Samantabhadra:

"In the space of a single moment, may I behold
all lions among humans of past, present, and future.
May I continually engage in their field of experience
through the power of illusion-like spiritual liberation."