(March 4, 2024 at 9:02 pm)Jillybean Wrote: Arguably though, the original Buddha (Gautama) did not focus on metaphysics at all. In fact he is quoted as saying that worrying about metaphysics is like being shot with a poisoned arrow and demanding to know where it came from, rather than focusing on getting it out of you before it poisons you. Most of the metaphysical ideas of Buddhism come from the pre-existing religion of Jainism.
Yes, I can see that.
If we take someone else's word about what it means to behave well, then we don't have to know about science or metaphysics or any of the foundations of their thought. Most of us are raised with certain values and use these to judge if we've been good or not.
Quote:The Buddha's highest priority was to eliminate suffering rather than answer questions about the supernatural.
Metaphysics isn't necessarily about the supernatural. None of what I believe about metaphysics includes anything supernatural.
To me, whether we're talking about Stoicism or Buddhism, the danger is that we accept some deracinated out-of-context version that wouldn't be recognized by serious practitioners.
When we read a text by a Stoic, we judge it according to values that we already hold. If you think "that's right; these are good values," it almost certainly means that what you interpret the text to mean is in line with your current values. If it were NOT in line with your current values, after all, then you wouldn't say it was a good text. This is why it's important to understand it within its context and foundations.
I learned this with Buddhism. When I was an undergrad in art school, we talked about Zen all the time. We had all kinds of ideas about it, from John Cage and Alan Watts, mostly. But then I got to Japan and discovered that what we thought of as Zen is entirely different from the Zen that Japanese people practice. We had Americanized it -- severed it from its roots and made it into something else. In fact when I read James' Varieties of Religious Experience it was clear to me that we had simply used exotic terms to describe a tradition of thought that was already old in America and Europe.
Now, there's nothing immoral about this. Religions always seem to change when they move into a new area. Everything that we admired about the San Francisco Zen Center (e.g. their charity work) is more American than traditional Buddhist. It is in fact more Christian than anything else -- just cut off from the Christian traditions that started it.
If we really want to learn about different traditions and people who think differently than we do, we have to get the wider context.
