Back to AtD....Tungaska Event, [in late 700s pages]

[Mark Kohut]

EXACTLY.....just what I was going to say. (smile)
 
More seriously, if TRP is some kind of Buddhist, as has been discussed then see below; I think he has
also laughed away all "the fantastic metaphysics which had preceded it in India".
 
What is left cannot be spoken of...to quote Wittgenstein in a family resemblance of meaning....

From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Sunday, April 1, 2012 4:55 PM
Subject: Re: Back to AtD....Tungaska Event, [in late 700s pages]

At the same time neglect of reason is never without its dangers and
its waste. The Buddhistic system itself suffers from a fundamental
contradiction, because its framers did not acknowledge the actual
limits of retribution nor the empirical machinery by which benefits
and injuries are really propagated. It is an onerous condition which
religions must fulfil, if they would prevail in the world, that they
must have their roots in the past. Buddhism had its mission of
salvation; but to express this mission to its proselytes it was
obliged to borrow the language of the fantastic metaphysics which had
preceded it in India. The machinery of transmigration had to serve as
a scaffolding to raise the monument of mercy, purity, and
spirituality. But this fabulous background given to life was really
inconsistent with what was best in the new morality; just as in
Christianity the post-rational evangelical ideals of redemption and
regeneration, of the human will mystically reversed, were radically
incompatible with the pre-rational myths about a creation and a
political providence. The doctrine of Karma was a hypostasis of moral
responsibility; but in making responsibility dynamic and
all-explaining, the theory discountenanced in advance the charitable
efforts of Buddhism—the desire to instruct and save every
fellow-creature. For if all my fortunes depend upon my former conduct,
I am the sole artificer of my destiny. The love, the pity, the
science, or the prayers of others can have no real influence over my
salvation. They cannot diminish by one tittle my necessary sufferings,
nor accelerate by one instant the period which my own action appoints
for my deliverance. Perhaps another's influence might, in the false
world of time and space, change the order or accidental vesture of my
moral experiences; but their quantity and value, being the exact
counterpart of my free merits and demerits, could not be affected at
all by those extraneous doings.

Therefore the empirical fact that we can help one another remains in
Buddhism (as in any retributive scheme) only by a serious
inconsistency; and since this fact is the sanction of whatever moral
efficacy can be attributed to Buddhism, in sobering, teaching, and
saving mankind, anything inconsistent with it is fundamentally
repugnant to the whole system. Yet on that repugnant and destructive
dogma of Karma Buddhism was condemned to base its instruction. This is
the heavy price paid for mythical consolations, that they invalidate
the moral values they are intended to emphasise. Nature has allowed
the innocent to suffer for the guilty, and the guilty, perhaps, to die
in some measure unpunished. To correct this imperfection we feign a
closed circle of personal retributions, exactly proportionate to
personal deserts. But thereby, without perceiving it, we have
invalidated all political and social responsibility, and denied that
any man can be benefited or injured by any other. Our moral ambition
has overleaped itself and carried us into a non-natural world where
morality is impotent and unmeaning.  Post-rational systems accordingly
mark no real advance and offer no genuine solution to spiritual
enigmas. The saving force each of them invokes is merely some remnant
of that natural energy which animates the human animal. Faith in the
supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his
fortunes; it is as far as possible from being the source of that
normal vitality which subsequently, if his fortunes mend, he may
gradually recover. Under the same religion, with the same posthumous
alternatives and mystic harmonies hanging about them, different races,
or the same race at different periods, will manifest the most opposite
moral characteristics. Belief in a thousand hells and heavens will not
lift the apathetic out of apathy or hold back the passionate from
passion; while a newly planted and ungalled community, in blessed
forgetfulness of rewards or punishments, of cosmic needs or celestial
sanctions, will know how to live cheerily and virtuously for life's
own sake, putting to shame those thin vaticinations. To hope for a
second life, to be had gratis, merely because this life has lost its
savour, or to dream of a different world, because nature seems too
intricate and unfriendly, is in the end merely to play with words;
since the supernatural has no permanent aspect or charm except in so
far as it expresses man's natural situation and points to the
satisfaction of his earthly interests. What keeps supernatural
morality, in its better forms, within the limits of sanity is the fact
that it reinstates in practice, under novel associations and for
motives ostensibly different, the very natural virtues and hopes
which, when seen to be merely natural, it had thrown over with
contempt. The new dispensation itself, if treated in the same spirit,
would be no less contemptible; and what makes it genuinely esteemed is
the restored authority of those human ideals which it expresses in a
fable.

~Santayana
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