AtD gold: the defense
Mark Kohut
markekohut at yahoo.com
Mon Feb 27 10:48:36 CST 2012
David Morris suggests:
"Think Koan. Focus on TRP's love of the failure of logic."
Don't know if this quite qualifies but it is ironically relevant if it
does not.
In the first 400some pages of AtD, there are at least three instances
where Eastern [Buddhist, I think, from my superficially informed ignorance] 'religious' notions
are made fun of, it seems----satirized, say we imitation lit critters. I cannot easily find either
of the latter two--one was a Zen takedown--but the first I posted: that Indian scientist
who went on about how the Nothing that was the Aether was really God in his tradition.
Decades ago, a Buddhist who had written a book, told me that there was a ..different....
(purer?) strain of Buddhism that believed that as soon as one said anything about
"Buddhist truths", one revealed he did not know the Buddha-nature. One only lives
the Buddha nature.
Some find Buddhist sympathies in TRP's work....and we have the cover of AtD......
(w a nod to DM, we might ask What is the Face-Value of the cover?)
so, IF TRP shares any Buddhist beliefs, he may be creating kind of joke Koans to point to the
purer strand?
And, to bring in "logic", that oft-fail, most Western philosophers, even those who can find sense,
if not truth, in religious language, find most Eastern religious language-- senseless....
(I, once, in a philosophy course on the concept of time----see one more personal reason why
I love AtD!---, actually brought up the notion of "Buddhist logic", which I had read something about
but can't remember now and got dismissed out of hand.)
So, with one more of Morris's not-at-face-value twists, are these examples TRP's creation of
a logic-bashing equivalent of The Liar's Paradox? That is, is it Western logic only that can refute
Eastern paradoxes so what kind of refutation is that?
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