sickest buddhist

yo!!!

thanks to aaron, adam w., and melissa h. who all posted this today.

philosophy is dangerous

bbc four published a documentary about mathematicians and philosophers who went mad, with the implication that exploring the nature of reality can lead one to madness. maths are dangerous!

it’s a question for me really how much madhyamaka, and the philosophic tradition of medieval India, really ponders ontological truth. but to the degree that people might use it as such, i can see how such questions might undermine one’s ground to such a degree or embraces nihilism to such a degree that it leads to madness.

the point of the Buddhist studies I think was less to find an underlying basis, such as with physics, but more to undermine the clinging to one’s constructed self-image. perhaps that alone is enough to risk mental illness? so much of our culture takes as a foregone conclusion that one’s self-image is of critical importance. undermining that assumption might be alienating alone.

i suspect the Buddhist question is not really asking if one’s self-image is valid or invalid, but rather asking if we cling to its validity as a kind of security; which is not a great security upon analysis. but the contemplative tradition of madhyamaka seems quite nihilistic and destructive, tearing down our assumptions about self-image as solid and trustworthy. i think they do that to undermine the clinging, not it’s total usefulness. perhaps it is important not to go too far with that, since the point is to see self-image as a tool of communication worth keeping - just not ontological and worth clinging to for safety. if one were to go too far with that, then surely nihilism and madness would result.

meditation as medicine

from the vajra regent osel tendzin:

“The practice of mindfulness is in no way medicinal. If we approach mindfulness with the view of either trying to cure or prevent disease, we will subtly pervert the practice. What is needed is to recognize our basic state of being as intrinsically pure. Generally speaking, we have a sense of separation: me and my body, me and my world, me and my environment, me and my problem, me and my disease. We feel that something foreign, something alien is happening to us. If there is something alien it follows that we need to get rid of it and get back to being pure. This is a universal concept of disease: whether we look at disease as a physical, religious, political, or scientific phenomenon, it is always pervaded by that need.”

i don’t know, it seems a subtle point whether we view the things we don’t like about our life, about ourselves, and then the approach to work with those not as a cure or medicinal. i see the point: better to identify with the aspect of ourselves that is open, flexible, receptive, and capable and then separate from that the habits that are less helpful. otherwise, thinking of ourselves as fundamentally broken — as fallen from grace — and needing prophylaxis is both less accurate and less effective. but is there really that much of a difference in that viewpoint? seems more subtle to me.

khenpo gawang in a lecture i attended once suggested that the buddhist schools in the middle period held more a view that one’s open mind was a mere kernel that had to be cultivated and nurtured to grow, and then the later view held by vajrayana schools was that the open, flexible mind was fully formed in each of us and merely obscured by bad habits and the approach was more to sweep away the strong hold of the habits. if that’s true, then this shift in view about medicine and cure might be a later innovation in buddhist approach. if that’s true, then it’s a refinement in method more so than fundamentally necessary.