Date: Wed, 07 Apr 1999 06:19:01 +0100
From: Chris Lees <chrislees@easynet.co.uk>
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: Re: A more
Joe Dees wrote:
> The claim in contention is that the belief that there is a "self" is a delusion.
> However, delusion cannot exist in the absence of someone who is deluded.
> Either there is a self, or there is not. If there is a self, then there is no delusion.
> If there isn't a self, then there is no one to be deluded, so there is, once again, no
> delusion. Methinks that some fundamentalist Buddhists without an understanding
> of their own religious doctrines are nevertheless attempting to inject them into a
> scientific discussion. When Zen masters such as D. T. Suzuki and others such as
> Dogen and Hui-neng insist that the self is nothing, they mean it in the way that
> the existentialists mean it; as no-thing, i.e. not a static thing, like a rock, but as a
> dynamically recursive becoming.
I would take your remarks more seriously if you had used the word
'illusion'.
As I understand 'delusion', it refers to pathology, as in
hallucinations, etc,
associated with mental disease, and is not synonymous with 'illusion'.
'Either there is a self, or there is not' is naive.
Suzuki, Dogen, and Hui-Neng take the same view as the existentialists ?
I think you are mistaken, both in that, and in your opinion re
"dynamically recursive becoming", whatever that is when it's at home.
Chris.
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~chrislees/tao.index.html
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