![[tmbchr]™](/journal/popocculture-blog-logo.jpg){kind=logo}
Buddha Beyond Belief
Rigorous Intuition today mentioned an excellent quote attributed to the Buddha (although I cannot seem to track down the original source):
“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”
While looking that up, I found another Buddhist writing called the Kalama Sutra, which contains a very similar message. (I’m editing it slightly to snip out some of the stylistic repetition)
[The people say to Buddha:]
There are some monks and brahmins, venerable sir, who visit Kesaputta. They expound and explain only their own doctrines; the doctrines of others they despise, revile, and pull to pieces. […] Venerable sir, there is doubt, there is uncertainty in us concerning them. Which of these reverend monks and brahmins spoke the truth and which falsehood?”
[Buddha responds:]
“It is proper for you, Kalamas, to doubt, to be uncertain; uncertainty has arisen in you about what is doubtful. Come, Kalamas. Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; nor upon what is in a scripture; nor upon surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious reasoning; nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over; nor upon another’s seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, ‘The monk is our teacher.’ Kalamas, when you yourselves know: ‘These things are bad; these things are blamable; these things are censured by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to harm and ill,’ abandon them.
I also really like this whole idea about “belief” being a hindrance to true understanding. Reminds me of an excellent quote I once found on the topic:
Considered in this light, beliefs in and about God (or anything else) may be derived from the incapacity to experience what God actually is. Someone who can experience God in a direct and evidential way no longer needs to hold beliefs in or about God.
Right on.
April 11th, 2005 at 2:40 pm
I followed your link back to the MetaHistory site which does have some good bits of writing in it. However, I’m inclined to see it as solidly inside a more religious tradition. Here’s a telling quote, on the subject of the scientific process:
Occasionally a breakthrough causes the prevailing paradigm to morph rapidly and radically into a new visionary schema. In physics such a breakthrough came early in the 20th century with the proposal of Special and General Relativity by Einstein, and the last quarter of the 20th century saw an equivalent shift in the life sciences.
In the 1970s the Gaia Hypothesis, jointly proposed by Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, opened exciting new prospects in biology and atmospheric physics.
To me, this is sheer nonsense. It sounds like a sophisticated version of basically fundie views. There is and can be no comparison between Einstein’s breakthroughs and the Gaia Hypothesis, as intriguing and fascinating as the latter may be.
I sympathise with the general desire expessed on the site that we need a new meta-story but, as a scientist and neo-gnostic myself, I have to say that no good meta-story can start or be based on such nonsense.
For me, the closest comparison to Einstein is Tolkien. The story of the Lord of the Rings has a vast scale and truth to the mythopoetic form which makes it a plausible contender for overthrowing the whole Abrahamic belief structure while containing and transcending it and many other mythic structures important to our species (including the Gaia hypothesis itself).
On a technical note, it would be cool if WordPress could convert comments into a forum discussion where appropriate (as is attempted albeit clumsily at the MetaHistory site).
April 11th, 2005 at 6:25 pm
ha, if theres one thing i hate its how forum discussion boards are organized. i have a really hard time navigating them and find them just generally unwieldy for organizing information. that said, theres probably a wordpress plugin or hack which emulates whatever it is you like about them…
but oh well. i think i understand what youre saying about critiquing metahistory. on the one hand, they have all these awesome bits and pieces about critically analyzing and re-writing all religions. but on the other, they have an almost literalist adherence to a neo-gnostic-gaian view which is largely of their own crafting. theres a lot of excellent scholarship there, but also a lot of material im either uninterested in or dont see the importance of.
i also love what tolkien did, but i dont get how you can call the gaia stuff nonsense, and then turn around and espouse that as the new guiding story. its no better or worse. its just a different story-system with different characters and focus. im less inclined to think we need one single new overarching meta-story, so much as we all need to be educated about how stories really work, and then pick the right one for us. thats what my story-systems site is all about. or at least aims to be.
April 11th, 2005 at 8:21 pm
“i dont get how you can call the gaia stuff nonsense, and then turn around and espouse that as the new guiding story. its no better or worse”
She didn’t say that. She said that comparing it to relativity theory was nonsense.
Funnily enough, based on that quote she put up, they weren’t actually comparing gaia hypothesis to relativity theory; they were, more or less, just saying that it’s a break-through observation like Einstein’s theory of relativity was.
Whether that’s a lofty claim or not, I don’t really know; it seems like a pretty subjective thing.
*shrug*
April 11th, 2005 at 8:54 pm
thats the point i was making above - that its a subjective comparison, and therefore may be nonsense to you, just like the tolkien stuf may be nonsense to somebody looking from a different perspective
April 12th, 2005 at 5:48 pm
Just to clarify the nonsense claim, I don’t think the Gaia hypothesis is nonsense at all. I love it. It provides a wonderful vision of interacting organisms and life matrices (or environments). It’s really great stuff. However, to me it’s nonsense to put it on the scale of Einstein’s work which is so powerful, predictive, mathematically precise and initially (and still) so damn counter-intuitive. Einstein’s theories will surely be transcended but they transcended Newton in a way that can never be reversed. However beautiful the Gaia theory is, it does not consist of such a vast paradigm switch. If you read closely you can see it all in Darwin anyway. Lovelock elaborates the detail of processes from a non-organic world to a life system and Margulis fills in the biological detail from there. However, there is nothing counter-intuitive in it, nothing startling or transcending at all, nothing that is precisely mathematically predictive. Einstein’s paradigm shift is as hard, as clear-cut, as scientifically substantial as you can get. By comparison, the Gaia hypothesis is mish-mash. Nice mish-mash, but mish-mash all the same.
I see religious stories as essentially mythopoetic stories (mixed up with “real” history and biography). What I like about Tolkein is that he leaves the “real” stuff out. He keeps it pure. And yet he asserts the alternative reality of his mythic world absolutely as if it is THE real world. No one has done it quite so convincingly. I’m not suggesting we all go out and “buy” this world. It is first and foremost Tolkien’s world, secondly the world of an Englishman, and only finally can it touch a far wider circle.
Your own story-systems project is a meta-story. “How stories really work” is a story in itself and “pick[ing] the right one for us” is the injunction that follows. It’s a story and injunction that I feel comfortable with, that’s why I’m here.
There is a sense in which we perceive stories as reflecting the “truth” or “reality” of our world and although we might agree that there are different perspectives, different spins on things, humanity seems to have a basic agreement that there is really only one truth or reality underlying all these perspectives. That is what we all struggle to discover or express. Science, religion, art, culture generally, are they not directed, at least in some part, to reaching for this “truth”?
I agree that forums and discussion boards are problematic. It’s a medium I’ve explored quite a bit and found unsatisfactory. However, blogs do imitate the formats of the print media, especially the article or essay format, and conversation is kept at a distance. I don’t have any ready answers to this. It’s just something I’ve noticed.
April 12th, 2005 at 6:02 pm
As an afterthought, it has occurred to me that the most important feature I would want in a blog is the equivalent of the “bump” feature in any good forum, that is, where a topic is bumped back to the top of the list when a new reply or contribution occurs. I am working with a php/mysql programmer to explore how to make a better blog, one that will better suit my needs than what is currently out there.
I very much like the content of this site and the underlying philosophy but there are things that annoy me.
1) I would like a colour change to links that lets me know that I have been there
2) I would like to return to where I was after following a link (as far as I know, opening a new window for each link is the only way to achieve this: the original page remains scrolled to the link point in the text)
I think that changes there would enhance the experience for the readers of your site.
April 12th, 2005 at 6:10 pm
PS: I get a 404 error when I click on “journal” above, to return to the main journal after commenting.
April 12th, 2005 at 6:47 pm
I just love this posting. I agree to it.
April 12th, 2005 at 8:35 pm
404 error should be fixed. thanks for spotting it. it reflected an old code structure. hm, links that i’ve visited appear as red, where unvisited appear as purple…
as to your forum points, im looking around for a good plugin that displays recently commented posts.
i actually do prefer the imitation of the print media that you described of blogs. conversation is lovely and valuable, but i do enjoy the clear separation that this blog format allows
the only forum style ive ever seen and liked is the one they use on barbelith.com
April 12th, 2005 at 11:46 pm
Good to see the 404 error gone, thanks.
Yes, the links change in the body of the text. It’s in the lists that they don’t change. For example, in the main Investigations index and in the “Read Similar Articles” list above here. Sorry for failing to see the difference there.
Yes, a “latest comments” box would be nice.
I tried to check out barbelith but they’re not currently accepting registrations due to current housekeeping relating to security issues. The format is simple and pretty but posters don’t seem to have much power over formatting. Quotes from earlier posts are expressed in bold text which is disconcerting. Is it the colour and simplicity that you like then?
Don’t get me wrong, I do think the regular print media formats are good, tried and tested you could say. They are still essentially conversation but, especially in the full published book form, there is just a longish response time between different points of view (although book reviews and reply articles can sometimes speed that up a little) .
When forums degenerate into chat (as they do) it drives me mad. That’s why I’m investigating new forms and formats. I also like the blend you’ve created here: although you have a main theme, it allows for a good breadth of commentary, and you have a couple of distinct styles, more serious (almost academic) and more laid back. It’s a refreshing approach on a subject that can easily get bogged down in seriousness and paranoia.
April 13th, 2005 at 12:27 am
More on links: they’re not changing colour after visiting the link inside the text of the investigations articles either. Just checked that. Changing colour seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
April 13th, 2005 at 12:43 am
yes… i know its not perfect. anyway, in the future, i’d prefer if you emailed me with comments about just general upkeep of the site. id rather try and keep the comments topically related to the post, if possible
April 13th, 2005 at 9:19 am
“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”
That’s an awesome quote. Kind of relates to gnosis and knowledge of the Self. Both Tao and Gnostic’s advocate what that quote is saying, which is cool and which is what I like about them.
April 13th, 2005 at 6:50 pm
“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”
I don’t like this quote, and it’s caused me to shudder every time I’ve seen it. It’s probably an incredibly liberal, almost fabricated, translation of something in the sutras which was probably very different. In fact it may very well be based on the excerpt that Tim posted.
The reason I don’t like it is because it makes the Buddha sound like he was advocating rationalism and judging things based on your current worldview (”common sense”.) I think if he did say anything like that, he was probably referring to the use of intuition.
April 26th, 2005 at 7:56 pm
[…] nothing to do with faith or dogmatic creeds. Also related to this is an excellent quote I nabbed from another site about belief: Considered in this light, beliefs in and a […]