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From:
Excalibur Stevens Biswas <notification+kr4marbae4mn@facebookmail.com> Date: Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 2:15 PM
Subject: [Broken people] Atheism in Buddhist thought
To: Broken people <
brokenpeoples@groups.facebook.com>
 | Atheism in Buddhist thought Richard P. Hayes: Principled Atheism in the Buddhist Scholastic Tradition Journal of Indian Philosophy, 16:5-28, 1988. In their systematic presentations of religious philosophy, the Indian Buddhists consistently defended the position that belief in an eternal creator god who superintends his creation and looks after the concerns of his creatures is a distraction from the central task of the religious life. ... ... The Buddhists were, for whatever reasons, eager to avoid falling into a theistic position. The motivation behind the present paper has been to discover what those reasons were. Section 1 will outline how the issue of God's existence is treated in the early Buddhist literature, especially in the Suttapitaka, where systematic Buddhist philosophy begins. Section 2 will review the treatment of the question of divine creation as an issue in the systematic philosophy of such thinkers as Vasubandhu (400--480), Dharmakirti (600--660), Santaraksita (725--788) and Kamalasila (740--795). And section 3 will show how the arguments for atheism are isomorphic with the arguments for a variety of other positions to which the Buddhist philosophers were committed. ... ... ... Generally speaking, the Buddhist philosophers denied the existence of anything that was supposed to retain its unity while occuring in or being related to a plurality of things, as this verse from the Lankavatara Sutra acknowledges: Personal identity, continuum, groups, causal conditions, atoms, primordial matter, and God the creator are regarded as mere ideas. ... ... ... Atheism, then, is a doctrine of fundamental importance within Buddhist religious philosophy rather than a mere accretion acquired through historical accident. As such it was a doctrine for which the Buddhist apologists during the academic period were strongly motivated to find good arguments. Although a variety of arguments were used, the most frequently used and the most powerful was a special application of the general Buddhist commitment to the principle that there can be no real unity binding together any plurality of things and that all notions of unity in plurality are therefore superimposed gratuitously upon experience by the experiencing mind. From this same principle the Buddhist scholastics in India also derived their commitment to nominalism or conceptualism in the realm of linguistic philosophy and to the theory of radical momentariness in the realm of metaphysics. full book is in here http://realindianews.blogspot.com/2011/11/principled-atheism-in-buddhist.html | realindianews.blogspot.com | |
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Palash Biswas
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