Forbidden Archeology

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Huseng
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Re: Forbidden Archeology

Post by Huseng »

MiphamFan wrote: So because we don't see pretas and devas, believing in them is also "wrong"?
Where did I say that?

Having logical proofs and evidence (satellite photos) of a spherical earth disproves Buddhism's flat earth cosmology.

Devas are not normally seen walking around talking to people, but nevertheless a good chunk of any population will report contact with a disembodied consciousness of some sort.

This is what I mean by following the evidence. There's more options available to us than scriptural literalism and modern materialism.
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Re: Forbidden Archeology

Post by MiphamFan »

In the same way that devas have their cities we cannot perceive because of our karma, we cannot perceive Mt Meru.

When we see water, pretas see only pus and devas see amrita. What we perceive is completely due to our karma, not to any objective reality.
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Re: Forbidden Archeology

Post by BrianG »

Indrajala wrote: Devas are not normally seen walking around talking to people, but nevertheless a good chunk of any population will report contact with a disembodied consciousness of some sort.
The extremely small chunk of the population who possess the siddhi which would enable them to perceive devas, would not normally report contact.

For a monk to report contact to a lay person, even if they possess the siddhi, would be a breakage of precepts.
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Re: Forbidden Archeology

Post by Huseng »

MiphamFan wrote: When we see water, pretas see only pus and devas see amrita. What we perceive is completely due to our karma, not to any objective reality.
We collectively actually perceive spherical earth. If we all went into space we'd see it with our own eyes.

That should be informative about the nature of our collective reality.
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Re: Forbidden Archeology

Post by Huseng »

BrianG wrote: The extremely small chunk of the population who possess the siddhi which would enable them to perceive devas, would not normally report contact.

For a monk to report contact to a lay person, even if they possess the siddhi, would be a breakage of precepts.
Monks never follow all their precepts, so that last point isn't really relevant.

Actually a lot of people throughout their lives will experience some sort of "ghost experience" or direct contact with an intelligent disembodied consciousness for better or worse.

John Michael Greer actually reviews these facts in his book:

https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=YMx ... &q&f=false

It isn't limited to certain religious traditions either. It isn't necessarily a willed or wanted contact either (like most ghost experiences, they're unwanted and unforeseen).
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Re: Forbidden Archeology

Post by Malcolm »

Indrajala wrote: Having logical proofs and evidence (satellite photos) of a spherical earth disproves Buddhism's flat earth cosmology.
This is a straw man. First of all, the Meru cosmology is fundamentally a moral cosmology. Second, it is not the only cosmology in Buddhist texts, merely the most referenced because of its axial nature.

As you are probably aware, E. Henning disputes the notion for example, that the authors of the Kalacakra root tantra could have believed in a flat earth cosmology, because their calculations alone contradict this notion — thus the modified Meru cosmology found in the Kalacakra is there for symbolic purposes, but is not taken literally.

The Meru cosmology presents an Indo-centric view of the ancient world, embellished with Indian aesthetics. While some, like Vasubandhu, may have taken it literally, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that not everyone in ancient India did.
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Re: Forbidden Archeology

Post by MiphamFan »

Indrajala wrote:
MiphamFan wrote: When we see water, pretas see only pus and devas see amrita. What we perceive is completely due to our karma, not to any objective reality.
We collectively actually perceive spherical earth. If we all went into space we'd see it with our own eyes.

That should be informative about the nature of our collective reality.
Sure, we collectively perceive a spherical earth.

Does it mean a spherical earth has any objective reality to it? No.
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Re: Forbidden Archeology

Post by Huseng »

Malcolm wrote: First of all, the Meru cosmology is fundamentally a moral cosmology.
No, it isn't. It was clearly believed by Buddhist writers in India to be a physical world atop which the sun and moon as discs circuited around. Did you read my blog post?
As you are probably aware, E. Henning disputes the notion for example, that the authors of the Kalacakra root tantra could have believed in a flat earth cosmology, because their calculations alone contradict this notion — thus the modified Meru cosmology found in the Kalacakra is there for symbolic purposes, but is not taken literally.
I haven't looked at the Kalacakra in any great detail, but I've read his work on the matter.

I think the simplest explanation is that mathematical astronomy or something based on it, all originally meant for a spherical earth, had to be accounted for given its universal applicability and accuracy, in a flat earth Mt. Meru cosmology. By the 11th century presumably such knowledge was readily accessible and thus anyone with an interest in astrology and astronomy would have been aware of the requisite math involved.

The Meru cosmology presents an Indo-centric view of the ancient world, embellished with Indian aesthetics. While some, like Vasubandhu, may have taken it literally, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that not everyone in ancient India did.
Plenty of non-Buddhist astronomers in India were quite clear that the earth is in fact spherical, but as far as I can tell, Buddhist writers did not display much awareness of a spherical earth.

To suggest otherwise is just wishful thinking. Few Buddhists want to admit their Buddhist predecessors in India were somewhat scientifically handicapped.
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Re: Forbidden Archeology

Post by Huseng »

MiphamFan wrote: Sure, we collectively perceive a spherical earth.

Does it mean a spherical earth has any objective reality to it? No.
If we collectively perceive a spherical earth, then clearly it has an objective reality to it so far as we can all agree and say, "Yes, I see it like this too."

That's how conventional reality works.
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Re: Forbidden Archeology

Post by MiphamFan »

Daniel Everett reports an incident when he was living among the Pirahã people.

The whole tribe was pointing and shouting at the riverbank at what was apparently empty air. They were seeing some kind of spirit, which he couldn't see. Chances are, if you or I had been there, we wouldn't see anything either. Whose convention is "objective"?
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Re: Forbidden Archeology

Post by Malcolm »

Indrajala wrote:
Malcolm wrote: First of all, the Meru cosmology is fundamentally a moral cosmology.
No, it isn't. It was clearly believed by Buddhist writers in India to be a physical world atop which the sun and moon as discs circuited around. Did you read my blog post?
That does not matter.

It is clearly a moral cosmology in so far as lower births are below the surface, humans [along with some animals] live on the surface of the four continents, whilst devas live above the surface in various palaces on the slopes of Meru.


As you are probably aware, E. Henning disputes the notion for example, that the authors of the Kalacakra root tantra could have believed in a flat earth cosmology, because their calculations alone contradict this notion — thus the modified Meru cosmology found in the Kalacakra is there for symbolic purposes, but is not taken literally.
I haven't looked at the Kalacakra in any great detail, but I've read his work on the matter.

I think the simplest explanation is that mathematical astronomy or something based on it, all originally meant for a spherical earth, had to be accounted for given its universal applicability and accuracy, in a flat earth Mt. Meru cosmology. By the 11th century presumably such knowledge was readily accessible and thus anyone with an interest in astrology and astronomy would have been aware of the requisite math involved.
And that math would have been known where and by whom? Nalanda scholars among others. If you read Henning carefully, he points out that two cosmological accounts are given.

The Meru cosmology presents an Indo-centric view of the ancient world, embellished with Indian aesthetics. While some, like Vasubandhu, may have taken it literally, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that not everyone in ancient India did.
Plenty of non-Buddhist astronomers in India were quite clear that the earth is in fact spherical, but as far as I can tell, Buddhist writers did not display much awareness of a spherical earth.
Textual myopia once again. If it is not in a text, it does not exist for you.
To suggest otherwise is just wishful thinking. Few Buddhists want to admit their Buddhist predecessors in India were somewhat scientifically handicapped.
No, it is an inference. But the problem with your method, once again, is that it is essential Carvaka in its point of view, you only accept direct perception as an authority.
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Re: Forbidden Archeology

Post by Urgyen Dorje »

Indrajala...

I'm not trying to bust chops here, but I think much of what you've said in this thread, speaks to my assertion that a post-structuralist approach to dharma and dharma texts is necessary. The emic-etic distinction proves my point insead of solving it. It's a western intellectual bias speaking in the view that subjects can be pinned like butterflies, and while we listen to their feelings and experiences, the scientist studies objectively what's really going on. It's a degredation and devaluation of the subjective which B Allan Wallace has so eloquently spoken of in his Taboo of Subjectivity. The way of knowing (WoK) of the subject is not legitimate unless it is subsequently certified and studied through the WoK of the observer who is self-reporting his or her own objectivity. It's also the case that what is "emic" and what is "etic" is not clearly defined. One the one hand, the objective academic cultural anthropologist can play the etic role studying the spiritual experience of the shaman and his or her relationship with nature. Through the value system of the shaman, he or she can be seen in the etic role, studying the spiritual impoverishment of the anthropologist and academic who is unable to see or experience what they see about nature.

This is the same with assertions about cosmology. It's entirely a structuralist need that there be one nonnegotiable representation of the physical world. This is based entirely in naive forms of materialism and a taboo of the subjective. Representations of the world can not be appreciate outside a whole constellation of values and symbols. I would challenge that an astronaut's photograph of the big blue marble is at all exchangable with a satellite photo with a map of the world, simply because they are related with different experiences and contexts. As Malcolm has pointed out, this is certainly the case with Buddhist cosmologies, they all have different contextual bases, and as such, are fundamantelly not relatable to modern science, whatever that is.

I think it's useful to understand and work with a representation of reality which is commonly negotiable, but I think it's important to understand it as just that. It's useful as a means of battling against extremes of idealism, but materialism suffers the same faults as idealism. There really is no such demonstrable thing as "material" or "matter". Materialism is fundamentally unjustifiable. It's just as unjustifiable as philosophical idealism. As such, there is really no clear reason to posit matter, the science and logic of matter, the expereince of matter, etc., as a more fundamental basis to evaluate truth than other things.

So no, following the evidence, wherever that may go, does not make one a materialist. I think examining that evidence in the space of such binary oppositions as mind/body, idealism/physicalism, etic/emic, does inadvertently do that, whether that is one's intention or not.
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Re: Forbidden Archeology

Post by Huseng »

Urgyen Dorje wrote:It's a western intellectual bias speaking in the view that subjects can be pinned like butterflies, and while we listen to their feelings and experiences, the scientist studies objectively what's really going on.
No, not at all. You forget that people from living traditions do the same thing with their own traditions. This is why here in Japan you have Buddhist clergy at Buddhist universities examining their Buddhist traditions from a basically secular methodology. The same can be seen in the Chinese and Theravadin Buddhist worlds (less so in the Tibetan world but their shedra programs are their scholastic institutions).

In the case of examining history and old texts, you cannot but be objective and scientific. The alternative is to project your own fantasies and opinions into a past you had nothing to do with. That makes for bad pseudo-scholarship.
It's also the case that what is "emic" and what is "etic" is not clearly defined.



That's also not true. The discussion about emic and etic is well-defined and understood by anthropologists and related scholars. You said you're in academia. You should know this.


This is the same with assertions about cosmology. It's entirely a structuralist need that there be one nonnegotiable representation of the physical world. This is based entirely in naive forms of materialism and a taboo of the subjective. Representations of the world can not be appreciate outside a whole constellation of values and symbols. I would challenge that an astronaut's photograph of the big blue marble is at all exchangable with a satellite photo with a map of the world, simply because they are related with different experiences and contexts. As Malcolm has pointed out, this is certainly the case with Buddhist cosmologies, they all have different contextual bases, and as such, are fundamantelly not relatable to modern science, whatever that is.
You're making things overly complicated.

It is really simple:

We know the earth is spherical. We know that in the past many people believed otherwise and formed their own logical theories about a flat earth based on the testimony of the Buddha in their sacred scriptures. It was a logical theory, but it was ultimately wrong and evidence and experience have completely disproved it.

Nevertheless, we can look at the texts and artwork and examine how these ideas changed and formed over time without getting emotionally wrapped up one way or another in them: that includes disappointment and/or resentment. When writing about the matter you remain objective and base your discussion on available evidence, which is normally limited to texts, artwork and archaeology. Testimonies from living traditions might have some utility. They might not.

The evidence based approach is not necessarily materialistic. You just can't necessarily accept mystic accounts at face value. It might work if someone showed up claiming to remember from a past life how to read the Indus Valley script and went ahead and deciphered it for you, but that never happens as far as I know. If someone claims to have met Padmasambhava in a past life and recalls his words, you have to remain skeptical, just as you would if a text appears claiming to likewise represent his words, otherwise you'll just end up with bad scholarship.

The way you evaluate texts and testimonies is to test them against available knowledge. So, if there's anachronisms in the text or the language is odd for whatever reason, you can usually judge it came later and work with it from there. Why does it make these claims? Who wrote it? Does it contain an earlier account but refurbished in another period? This is how philology works. It works surprisingly well. This is how you date texts like the Vedas: the mention of iron or loanwords from other languages indicates different time periods.

If you find such an approach unrewarding and boring, fine, but many people do enjoy it and find it enriching and worthwhile.
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Re: Forbidden Archeology

Post by Malcolm »

Indrajala wrote:
The evidence based approach is not necessarily materialistic.
It is necessarily materialistic.
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Re: Forbidden Archeology

Post by Schrödinger’s Yidam »

The American flag represents the United States. However nobody would try to use it as a map. That's stupid. But just because you can't use the flag as a map doesn't mean it isn't an appropriate representation for the U.S.
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Re: Forbidden Archeology

Post by Huseng »

Malcolm wrote: It is necessarily materialistic.
So I suppose you believe the earth is flat because scripture says so despite materialist science proposing otherwise? How about evolution? One might easily imagine you deny this too because it stems from a materialist tradition.
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Re: Forbidden Archeology

Post by Kaccāni »

Evidence means qualified sample for a specific use.
Sample means thing.
Qualified means "has properties".
Thing with properties for a specific use = material.

Thus, one has created a material by "using evidence".
It is not possible to use evidence without also having material.

Not much more difficult than that.

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Re: Forbidden Archeology

Post by Malcolm »

Indrajala wrote:
Malcolm wrote: It is necessarily materialistic.
So I suppose you believe the earth is flat because scripture says so despite materialist science proposing otherwise? How about evolution? One might easily imagine you deny this too because it stems from a materialist tradition.
I have never made any kind of claim that resembles this. You are tilting windmills. I have only referred to different cosmologies in order to point out that they are not fixed frames of reference in pan-Buddhist doctrine. The cosmology of the Avatamsaka or the Realms and Transformations of Sound Tantra [sgra thal gyur] in no way resembles the cosmology of the Kosha.

One of the key features of the Carvaka school is that they reject all authorities other than direct perception.

The consequence of the methodology advocated by you is largely the same. Ergo, whether you intend it to be or not, your methodology is rooted in the western tradition of logical positivism, it is therefore materialist, even if you are not in terms of your personal beliefs a materialist or a physicalist.

"Evidence-based" is a nice catch phrase, for example, it is used in medicine quite a bit these days too, given that medicine is the origin of the term. To give you an example of the problem:
Evidence-based medicine is controversial not because people disagree about whether medical decisions ought to incorporate the best available evidence, but because they disagree about how narrowly evidence should be defined.14 Neither advocates nor opponents of evidence-based medicine consistently differentiate between the everyday meaning of evidence and the evidence of evidence-based medicine that refers only to the results of particular types of research.12,15 This persistent confusion makes the label evidence-based medicine divisive, and authors on both sides of the debate have suggested that it be discarded or replaced.
http://journals.lww.com/academicmedicin ... ne.15.aspx


It is much the same when you used the term "evidence-based" approach to Buddhist studies, or any historical inquiry. How wide or narrow is the evidence? This is where bias comes in, yours, mine, everyones.
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Re: Forbidden Archeology

Post by Urgyen Dorje »

Indrajala...

Thanks for your responses. I don't entirely disagree with them, though I do think you are missing my point completely. And for the record, I am not suggesting that traditional academic methods are entirely without basis, nor that they are entirely without fruit. And also to be clear, I'm not specifically addressing my criticism towards Buddhist academic study, but more broadly to Western intellectual life. I would even include my discipline, the physical sciences in that criticism. My point is that without examining the fundamental assumptions and biases of our methods, we render the world a much impoverished place.

I don't think using materialist methods necessarily makes one a materialist. But I do think using nothing but materialist methods does render one's world view materialist.

Somebody brought up the American flag. This is as good of a demonstration as any.

If we're a structuralist, we'll look at the flag and try to locate it in a historical context. We can look at records and see different apocryphal stories about how it was actually designed. There's a story of Betsy Ross. There's a story of it being designed as a Naval Flag. We can dig through letters and diaries and maybe figure out which one is true. Regardless, we locate it in the history of the birth the American nation, and we note that there are 50 stars for the fifty states, and 13 stripes for the 13 original colonies.

A post structuralist would point out that what the flag really means depends upon context. As Derrida said, everything is context.

So my godfather fought at Iwo Jima, where that iconic image of the marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi arose. For people who were in the middle of a seemingly endless and hopeless war, that flag meant something very different than 50 stars for 50 states and 13 stripes for 13 colonies. And then there is my friend who was a member of the SDS during the Vietnam war-- that flag meant something very different for him. And then there is my friend who sought asylum in the US, and became a citizen, fleeing civil war in Cote d'Ivoire. The flag definitely means something different for him. We can then think of what the US flag on the drones who kill people in remote areas of Pakistan symbolizes.

So we could say that this is really an emic-etic type of thing. This is where we just fall into materialism. We're basically just saying, well, these historians have picked through these documents, and this is what this symbol means. And all that other stuff, that's just subjective stuff that's floppy headed. We can do some ethnography, but we're the ones who are objective and not floppy headed. I think that's an impoverished worldview, as there is no symbol without something it symbolizes, and certainly without someone to perceive and understand the symbol. So I say all these histories, all these narratives, all these symbolic meanings are simultaneously valid. All symbols are polyvalent. Back to Derrida, everything is context. It's context which pins down which symbolic meaning is operative.

And this same reasoning applies to Buddhist texts, Buddhist symbolic systems such as cosmological schema, and so on.

It also applies to physics, chemistry, and engineering.
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Re: Forbidden Archeology

Post by mañjughoṣamaṇi »

Indrajala wrote:That's also not true. The discussion about emic and etic is well-defined and understood by anthropologists and related scholars. You said you're in academia. You should know this.
Very few Anglophone sociocultural/social or linguistic anthropologists make use of emic and etic distinctions. I've spoken with some German and French anthropologists, and while I am not as well read in the literature in these languages, it appears that it is not a common framework for inquiry there either. There are numerous problems with the distinction that I touch on in the quote below. The only real holdouts using it are some archaeologists since they are necessarily (if not historical archaeologists) working without textual evidence or the ability to talk to people or observe how they are using the material artifacts they study. Even then it is primarily used as a heuristic to highlight the limits of an etic approach, not to privilege it.
Urgyen Dorje wrote: So we could say that this is really an emic-etic type of thing. This is where we just fall into materialism. We're basically just saying, well, these historians have picked through these documents, and this is what this symbol means. And all that other stuff, that's just subjective stuff that's floppy headed. We can do some ethnography, but we're the ones who are objective and not floppy headed. I think that's an impoverished worldview, as there is no symbol without something it symbolizes, and certainly without someone to perceive and understand the symbol. So I say all these histories, all these narratives, all these symbolic meanings are simultaneously valid. All symbols are polyvalent. Back to Derrida, everything is context. It's context which pins down which symbolic meaning is operative.
I wrote something similar in a post a while back:
mañjughoṣamaṇi wrote:
smcj wrote:The practice of Buddhism is emic. The study of Buddhism is etic. One path culminates in enlightenment. The other path culminates in tenure.
There are problems with this distinction when used outside of its originating field. The emic and etic distinction is an analogy drawn from the study of phonetics and phonemics/phonology. In linguistics and related disciplines, phonetics is the study of either the articulatory mechanisms or the acoustic properties of individual sounds. These can be measured without a lot of observer bias using everything from x-rays to wave analysis. Phonetics is very close to an 'exact science'. Phonology can't be measured in the same way, but can be teased out and inferred from elicited responses. However, without phonology you don't get to the systematic and relatively structured side of a language. If you only do phonetics you get a collection of unstructured sounds, not how the sounds are used to differentiate meaning.

One problem with the application of the etic/emic distinction to other fields is that much of the time researchers are presupposing that their own emic categories are etic. Alongside this, they tend to dismiss the 'subjective' side of things and focus on 'atomic' elements like specific material evidence, dates, etc. This is analogous to the study of sounds in phonetics. It just tells you what the sounds are, not what they mean. By bracketing off the emic, or subjective, you lose the ability to understand how people contextualize these atomic elements for themselves. What often happens then is that researchers smuggle in their own theories of human nature to account for why people reacted a certain way to all these atomic events (homo economicus, prestige, reproductive success, etc.).

http://dharmawheel.net/viewtopic.php?f= ... 45#p272945
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