Great article. My comment does not concern the article, but concerns your response to Rigo.

Specifically, can you point me to the source material, to the actual foundation for your assertions concerning radical Buddhists and how they might accomplish the alleviation of suffering through the elimination of “symbolic thought that generates craving”? Sounds a lot like thought control to me, so I’m curious as to who these radical Buddhists actually are? A particular school, a lineage, a sect, a modern teacher?

Thanks,
Bill

Nice to hear your voice.

What’s God’s masochism? Is she hurting in fun ways from this game she set up?

You know I don’t believe in Gods. It was a parable.

And as for tanha, I’ve heard you say that before and there is something pat in final about how it sounds. Like you’ve explained something but for me it opens a worm-can of wonder, rather than closing it.

Basis–meaning that it causes or is at the root of it all. Let’s be ethologists for a moment here. Do animals crave and suffer too? I would say yes, but I know that some Buddhists would say no, they have pain but not suffering and that they have appetites but not cravings, or something like that. To me that’s a fine distinction that would be hard to make in any way that isn’t subjective. That is, I don’t know how to distinguish black and white between appetite and craving. But I think the Buddhist idea is that people crave and suffer because they have thoughts or concrete expectations that grow in their minds and if we didn’t we would be like other creatures appetitive but not craving; sometimes pained but not suffering.
In which case we’d have to look for what makes for that difference between us and them. To me that’s obvious. We’re symbolic creatures–it’s the foresight, hindsight, sidesight thing I refer to in this article.

A radical Buddhist might say therefore that alleviating suffering (not just so we feel better but so we impose less suffering on others) can be accomplished by eliminating symbolic thought that generates craving. That is radical, and vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy since it’s an argument made by symbolic means. It’s not too hypocritical though. No more so than a US Citizen donating money saved on taxes to a campaign to impose higher taxes on himself. The radical could be saying “We’ve been given the foresight to be able to see that we’d be better off without this foresight, so try to eliminate it.”

The moderate Buddhist might be saying something more like “so try to reduce it.” I get that. Maybe our suffering is simply because we think too much, not that we shouldn’t think but should think less.

That raises another problem for me however, because if thinking is still good or unavoidable in some part, then where is that part? Most folks I know who promote less thinking do so selectively with a preference toward thinking fewer of the inconvenient thoughts. That is, it’s first natural use is to edit out what they don’t want to hear. The Sarah Palin effect. “You think too much. Your hungry ghosts are bumming me out. You’re causing me suffering.”

What do you think Rigo? But know that if your answer is terse and glib, I’ll wonder if it’s wise or the Palin effect. I wouldn’t put it past any of us to employ any trick in the book.

Love,

Jeremy

2. craving (S. tanha) is the basis for suffering