Marsha to Andre:
What was Buddha doing sitting under that Bo Tree? My guess he was
meditating and using his intellect (rationality& scientific observation) to
study the mind.
Andre:
Hi Marsha, not sure he was doing this. At least, this is not what 'legend' says
about his quest.
He was deeply concerned about questions relating to the meaning of life in the
process of living it. He wondered what the point of it all was amid the
sickness, old age, death and human suffering he saw all around him.
He had been exposed to the various religious and philosophical
explanations/views about this and saw (for example)in the Hindu ritualistic
religious (soteriological) practices an overemphasis on the determinate (SQ)
rather than the indeterminate (DQ)nature of life. Rituals are to
'reveal'/'safeguard' Quality, not obscure it. The Buddha, put simply, saw, and
was disillusioned by, this notion that Quality was replaced by static
representations of it. (needles to say, all of the 'Western' and 'Middle
Eastern' religions have fallen prey to this).
To quote Northrop:'Thereby, the root insight of Brahmanism, the true nature of
the divine,that is,the compassionately moving, indeterminate aesthetic
continuum, had been lost'(p380).
This is what set the Buddha on his path and I doubt very much that he applied
his 'rationality' or his 'scientific observation' to 'study the mind'.
He came to devote his time and energy to 'finding a way to extricate
himself from the universal despair that seemed to form the very ground
of human existence...And then, while seated under a tree, Gautama
experienced enlightenment. At last he thoroughly understood the human
problem,its origin, its ramifications, and its solution'. ( Hagan, p6-7).
To finish with Northrop: ' The important point, however, is that the
Buddha, for all his return to and more insistent emphasis upon the
primacy of the indeterminate, immediately experienced, all embracing
Nirvana, was the starkest of realists. It is precisely because of this
realism with respect to, and his fellow feeling for, the immediately
experienced pains and sufferings of men and animals and plants that he
has attached unto himself and deservedly earned the name of the
compassionate Buddha'(ibid).
It is not difficult to make the link to both James and Pirsig in this
regard ( i.e their insistence on pragmatism and radical empiricism) as
this appears, to me at least, to point to the essence of the MOQ that
Pirsig was talking about and the link to Eastern 'mystical' insights of
the indeterminate aesthetic continuum i.e. Quality
To paraphrase Pirsig: if a metaphysics doesn't in some way seek to
improve the world, then forget about it.
For what it is worth.
Andre
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