Open Integral

Don’t get me wrong. Plain old masturbation is fun and healthy. I engage it in when I can, which is increasingly less these days as I age and my prostate enlarges. So I have to sublimate my maturbation into words and ideas, but it’s the same basic principle. And it’s fun and healthy too.

But is it merely masturbation? See the below abstract of the article “Buddhist Hermeneutics” by Robert Thurman. This demonstrates that such philosophy is far more than just mental abstraction but a component to the path of “enlightenment.” It also demonstrates that such ancient hermeneuticists were quite advanced in postformal operational reasoning. So much so that it calls into question Ken’s claim that their interpretations of “spirt” or the “nondual” were inadequate by today’s postmetaphysical standards.

The abstract (minus the special characters that didn’t translate here):

“Hermeneutics” as a philosophical discipline of rational interpretation of a traditional canon of Sacred Scriptures authoritative for a religious community has usually been considered peculiar to the West. This notion is anchored only in the misconception that “Eastern” thought is somehow “non-rational,” or “mystical,” hence excused from the burden of reconciling the tensions between some forms of authority and philosophical reason. Buddhism in particular has been misconceived in this way, due to its emphasis on meditational experience and non-dualistic wisdom. These misconceptions are quickly cleared away when we examine the role of authority in Buddhist teaching, appreciating the predominantly pedagogic concerns of kyamuni during his long tenure as a teacher who sought to encourage the individual disciple’s ability to think for himself; the role of analytic reasoning in Buddhist practice, wherein a practitioner’s first task is to sift through the complexities of Doctrine to discover its inner meaning as relevant to his own experience and its systematic transformation; the role of hermeneutical strategies in guiding the practitioner’s analytical meditations, wherein the first two stages of wisdom (prajñ) are cultivated through a refined discipline of philosophical criticism of all false views (drsti), such as naive realism, nihilism, etc., as to the nature of ultimate reality and of the self; and finally the role of transcendent experience, wherein the transcendence of verbalization is approached not as a non-rational escape into mysticism, but as an affirmation of empiricism, a rational acknowledgement of the fact that reality, even ordinary reality, is never, in the final analysis, reducible to what we may say about it. These four functions in Buddhism are traditionally expressed in an ancient rule of thumb known as the “Four Reliances”: “Rely on the Teaching, not the Teacher; rely on the meaning, not the letter; rely on the definitive meaning, not the interpretable meaning; rely on wisdom, not on consciousness.” To examine the traditional usage of these Reliances, we must trace the work of the Buddhist hermeneuticians, who, far from maintaining any “golden silence” beyond the silvery speech of philosophers, have kept alive over two and one half millennia an illustrious line known as the “Golden Speech” (Ch. jin ko) tradition, whose members include from among the sage-scholars of India, Tibet, China, and Japan, kyamuni himself (himself the first hermeneutician of his own Holy Doctrine!), Ngrjuna, ryadeva, Asanga, Chih I, Candrakrti, Fa Tsang, ntaraksita, and Tsong Khapa. This latter, working in the 14th and 15th centuries, was one of the greatest scholars of any of the Buddhist cultures, and his masterwork, Essence of the Eloquent, composed in 1407, provides a golden key with which the door to this tradition can be opened.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 25th, 2007 at 9:57 am and is filed under Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.