MDMD(1) - Comments: china

[David Casseres]

Doug Millison sez

>In addition to mysticism, Buddhism offers a rich ethical guide for living,
>perhaps more finely tuned than the 10 Commandments to the practicalities of
>life on this planet and with each other. One of the points Batchelor made
>in the interview was something like (I paraphrase, crudely) that a major
>opportunity was lost to more fully integrate Buddhist and European thought
>at the time of the early encounters between Buddhism and the West.

Of course, a rich ethical guide for living was the very last thing 
Europeans wanted at that point.  "Got one of those," they might have 
said, "where's the gold?"

>... Buddhism's more integrated view of humankind as
>just another expression of consciousness in the cosmos ..., compared with
>Christianity, which, in one
>interpretation, gives man dominion over nature, which can lead to the
>exploitative practices that Pynchon savages throughout his fiction. (It's
>also true that there's a school of Christian thought which interprets
>scripture and doctrine to support a deep ecological view of the world and
>of man's place within it --  William Slothrop's "Soul in every stone" --
>only this view hasn't predominated throughout the Christian epoque).

That's a very good statement of one of Pynchon's chief moral themes, and 
I thank you for the connection to the "Soul in every stone" line.  I 
mentioned before that Pynchon's religious leanings struck me as more 
Anabaptist (Quaker, Shaker, Amish, Mennonite etc.) than Buddhist, but 
this suggests something broader, more inclusive.



Cheers,
David